Sample records for big particle adventure

In this series, comedian and physicist Ben Miller asks the CERN scientists what they hope to find. If the LHC is successful, it will explain the nature of the Universe around us in terms of a few simple ingredients and a few simple rules. But the Universe now was forged in a Big Bang where conditions were very different, and the rules were very different, and those early moments were crucial to determining how things turned out later. At the LHC they can recreate conditions as they were billionths of a second after the Big Bang, before atoms and nuclei existed. They can find out why matter and antimatter didn't mutually annihilate each other to leave behind a Universe of pure, brilliant light. And they can look into the very structure of space and time - the fabric of the Universe

In this series, comedian and physicist Ben Miller asks the CERN scientists what they hope to find. The notion of atoms dates back to Greek philosophers who sought a natural mechanical explanation of the Universe, as opposed to a divine one. The existence what we call chemical atoms, the constituents of all we see around us, wasn't proved until a hundred years ago, but almost simultaneously it was realised these weren't the indivisible constituents the Greeks envisaged. Much of the story of physics since then has been the ever-deeper probing of matter until, at the end of the 20th century, a complete list of fundamental ingredients had been identified, apart from one, the much discussed Higgs particle. In this programme, Ben finds out why this last particle is so pivotal, not just to atomic theory, but to our very existence - and how hopeful the scientists are of proving its existence.

In this series, comedian and physicist Ben Miller asks the CERN scientists what they hope to find. The atoms that make up our material world are important to us, but it turns out they aren't so significant on the cosmic stage. In fact early in the search for the stuff of atoms, researchers discovered particles that played no part in Earthly chemistry - for example particles in cosmic rays that resemble electrons (the stuff of electricity and the chemical glue in molecules) in almost all respects except that they weigh 140 times more. "Who ordered that?" one Nobel laureate demanded. They also discovered antimatter - the destructive mirror-image particles at obliterate all matter they come into contact with. In fact, the Universe is mostly made up of particles that could never make atoms, so that we are just the flotsam of the cosmos. But the main constituent of the Universe, what makes 80% of creation, has never been seen in the lab. Researchers at CERN believe they can create samples of it, down here on Earth...

Particle physics is a subject that can send shivers down the spines of students and educators alike--with visions of long mathematical equations and inscrutable ideas. This perception, along with a full curriculum, often leaves this topic the road less traveled until the latter years of school. Particle physics, including quarks, is typically not…

Simon Singh looks at the stories behind the discovery of 5 of the universe's most significant subatomic particles: the Electron, the Quark, the Anti-particle, the Neutrino and the "next particle". 3. The Anti-particle. It appears to be the stuff of science fiction. Associated with every elementary particle is an antiparticle which has the same mass and opposite charge. Should the two meet and combine, the result is annihilation - and a flash of light. Thanks to mysterious processes that occurred after the Big Bang there are a vastly greater number of particles than anti-particles. So how could their elusive existence be proved? At CERN particle physicists are crashing together subatomic particles at incredibly high speeds to create antimatter, which they hope will finally reveal what happened at the precise moment of the Big Bang to create the repertoire of elementary particles and antiparticles in existence today.

This book presents what has been the biggest scientific equipment ever designed on earth: the LHC (large hadron collider) and its associated experiments (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE) that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. About 10.000 physicists and engineers from 50 countries have taken part into the project that began in 1989. This book is composed of the following chapters: 1) the standard model (SM) of particle physics, 2) the experimental success of SM, 3) the shortfalls of SM, 4) the new physics, 5) the original big bang, 6) the LHC, 7) particle detection, 8) ATLAS and CMS experiments, 9) the first data from LHC, 10) data analysis, 11) the quest for the Higgs boson, 12) the search for new physics, 13) LHCb and ALICE experiments, and 14) future prospects

Simon Singh looks at the stories behind the discovery of 5 of the universe's most significant subatomic particles: the Electron, the Quark, the Anti-particle, the Neutrino and the "next particle". 5. The Next Particle The "sparticle" - a super symmetric partner to all the known particles could be the answer to uniting all the known particles and their interactions under one grand theoretical pattern of activity. But how do researchers know where to look for such phenomena and how do they know if they find them? Simon Singh reviews the next particle that physicists would like to find if the current particle theories are to ring true.

Scientists at an international symposium in Beijing have recommended that a new global particle accelerator should be based on "cold" or superconducting technology, bringing the construction of the multi-billion dollar facility one step closer to reality (½ page)

"The world's largest machine is reputed to be the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva and everything about it is big. Designed to carry out high energy particle collisions, when completed next year, one of the collider's experiments includes a 10'000 ton detector." (1/2 page)

The observed primordial He/sup 4/ abundance imposes astrophysical constraints on the possible departures from radiation dominance in the big bang universe during the neutron hardening era (at epoch t roughly-equal1 sec). Limits are obtained which, along with the data on the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation, practically rule out any stages of superheavy stable-particle dominance in the era 1< or approx. =t<10/sup 10/ sec, thereby setting restrictions on current elementary-particle theories.

Ideas which are currently under discussion for increasing the present energy range of particle accelerators but which are also economical in resources and do not demand elaborate techniques, are examined. Among the possible methods reviewed are the use of laser beams, the electron ring concept, and the use of wake fields left by electrons in storage rings. (U.K.)

We point out that the existence of metastable, τ>10 3 s, negatively charged electroweak-scale particles (X - ) alters the predictions for lithium and other primordial elemental abundances for A>4 via the formation of bound states with nuclei during big bang nucleosynthesis. In particular, we show that the bound states of X - with helium, formed at temperatures of about T=10 8 K, lead to the catalytic enhancement of 6 Li production, which is 8 orders of magnitude more efficient than the standard channel. In particle physics models where subsequent decay of X - does not lead to large nonthermal big bang nucleosynthesis effects, this directly translates to the level of sensitivity to the number density of long-lived X - particles (τ>10 5 s) relative to entropy of n X - /s -17 , which is one of the most stringent probes of electroweak scale remnants known to date

We point out that the existence of metastable, tau>10(3) s, negatively charged electroweak-scale particles (X-) alters the predictions for lithium and other primordial elemental abundances for A>4 via the formation of bound states with nuclei during big bang nucleosynthesis. In particular, we show that the bound states of X- with helium, formed at temperatures of about T=10(8) K, lead to the catalytic enhancement of 6Li production, which is 8 orders of magnitude more efficient than the standard channel. In particle physics models where subsequent decay of X- does not lead to large nonthermal big bang nucleosynthesis effects, this directly translates to the level of sensitivity to the number density of long-lived X- particles (tau>10(5) s) relative to entropy of nX-/s less, approximately <3x10(-17), which is one of the most stringent probes of electroweak scale remnants known to date.

In this work, a mathematical model in four dimensions proposed to predict the behavior of the transport phenomena of mass (energy) in the space-time continuum through a metric tensor in the Planck scale is presented. The Ricci tensor was determined with the aim of measuring the turbulent flow of a mass with a large gravitational field similar to that which is believed to have existed in the Big Bang. Computing the curvature of space-time through tensor analysis, we predict a vacuum solution of the Einstein field equations through numerical integration with approximate solutions. A quantum vacuum is filled with virtual particles of enormous superficial gravity of black holes and wormholes as predicted by other authors. By generating the geodesic equations, we obtain the relativistic equation, which is the carrier of information pertaining to the behavior of the entropy of matter. The results of the measurements of the evolution of the mass during its collapse and evaporation allow us to argue the evidence of virtual particles including all the values (and beyond) of the experimental search by other authors for gauges and Higgs bosons. We conclude that the matter behaves as virtual particles, which appear and disappear in Planck time at speeds greater than that of light, representing those that probably existed during the Big Bang.

For decades, particle physicists have developed custom software because the scale and complexity of our problems were unique. In recent years, however, the ``big data'' industry has begun to tackle similar problems, and has developed some novel solutions. Incorporating scientific Python libraries, Spark, TensorFlow, and machine learning tools into the physics software stack can improve abstraction, reliability, and in some cases performance. Perhaps more importantly, it can free physicists to concentrate on domain-specific problems. Building bridges isn't always easy, however. Physics software and open-source software from industry differ in many incidental ways and a few fundamental ways. I will show work from the DIANA-HEP project to streamline data flow from ROOT to Numpy and Spark, to incorporate ideas of functional programming into histogram aggregation, and to develop real-time, query-style manipulations of particle data.

This paper outlines a system for generating adventure games based on open data, and describes a sketch of the system im- plementation at its current state. The adventure game genre has been popular for a long time and diers signicantly in design priorities from game genres which are commonly ad......- dressed in PCG research. In order to create believable and engaging content, we use data from DBpedia to generate the game's non-playable characters locations and plot, and OpenStreetMaps to create the game's levels...

In a rapidly changing tourism industry, the international competition is strong and the well-travelled tourists have high expectations. This has led to an increasing emphasis on the development of new services and experiences to attract tourists’ attention. Innovation has become a “buzz-word”, seen...... as essential for survival and growth. With cases from Norway and NZ this thesis examines what innovation means in the context of adventure tourism businesses, and explore relations between such change processes and the available knowledge resources of the business. Several factors influence the knowledge...... resources of a given business, and this study looks specifically at how the size of the business, its location, and the maturity of the specific adventure tourism activity shapes processes of knowledge development and innovation. The study takes it starting point in research on small businesses and tourism...

This article discusses the meanings of adventure and its role in learning. An analysis of literature from the fields of education, recreation and tourism suggests that definitions of adventure are constantly undergoing reinterpretation. We highlight how "narrow" views of adventure, which appeal to notions of risk and danger, are…

Simon Singh looks at the stories behind the discovery of 5 of the universe's most significant subatomic particles: the Electron, the Quark, the Anti-particle, the Neutrino and the "next particle". It's the most populous particle in the universe. Millions of these subatomic particles are passing through each one of us. With no charge and virtually no mass they can penetrate vast thicknesses of matter without any interaction - indeed the sun emits huge numbers that pass through earth at the speed of light. Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry electric charge. As a result they're extremely difficult to detect . But like HG Wells' invisible man they can give themselves away by bumping into things at high energy and detectors hidden in mines are exploiting this to observe these rare interactions.

Simon Singh looks at the stories behind the discovery of 5 of the universe's most significant subatomic particles: the Electron, the Quark, the Anti-particle, the Neutrino and the "next particle". 1. The Electron Just over a century ago, British physicist J.J. Thompson experimenting with electric currents and charged particles inside empty glass tubes, showed that atoms are divisible into indivisible elementary particles. But how could atoms be built up of these so called "corpuscles"? An exciting 30 year race ensued, to grasp the planetary model of the atom with its orbiting electrons, and the view inside the atom was born. Whilst the number of electrons around the nucleus of an atom determines their the chemistry of all elements, the power of electrons themselves have been harnessed for everyday use: electron beams for welding,cathode ray tubes and radiation therapy.

Simon Singh looks at the stories behind the discovery of 5 of the universe's most significant subatomic particles: the Electron, the Quark, the Anti-particle, the Neutrino and the "next particle". 2. The Quark "Three Quarks for Master Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark." James Joyce's Finnegans Wake left its mark on modern physics when physicist Murray Gell Mann proposed this name for a group of hypothetical subatomic particles that were revealed in 1960 as the fundamental units of matter. Basic particles it seems are made up of even more basic units called quarks that make up 99.9% of visible material in the universe.. But why do we know so little about them? Quarks have never been seen as free particles but instead, inextricably bound together by the Strong Force that in turn holds the atomic nucleus together. This is the hardest of Nature's fundamental forces to crack, but recent theoretical advances, mean that the properties of the quark are at last being revealed.

We study the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) scenario with late-decaying exotic particles with lifetime longer than {approx}1 s. With a late-decaying particle in the early universe, predictions of the standard BBN scenario can be significantly altered. Therefore, we derive constraints on its primordial abundance. We pay particular attention to hadronic decay modes of such particles. We see that the non-thermal production process of D, {sup 3}He and {sup 6}Li provides a stringent upper bound on the primordial abundance of late-decaying particles with hadronic branching ratio.

The subject is covered in chapters, entitled: our galaxy and its hundred billion stars; galaxies, population of the Universe; radioastronomy, a deeper foray in space; spectra, valuable messengers; the expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang; Einstein's General Relativity Theory or gravitation by the curvature of space; curved spaces, surprising worlds; models of the Universe; space-time; cosmological horizons, limits of the Universe; the past of the Universe, from the primeval soup to us; the future of the Universe; anomalous spectral redshifts; quasars, at the boundaries of space; the Space Telescope, a new leap in knowledge; black holes and their fantastic properties; extraterrestrials. (U.K.)

On July 4, 2012, scientists at the giant atom smashing facility at CERN announced the discovery of a subatomic particle that seems like a tantalizingly close match to the elusive Higgs Boson, thought to be responsible for giving all the stuff in the universe its mass. Since it was first proposed nearly fifty years ago, the Higgs has been the holy grail of particle physicists: in finding it they validate the “standard model” that underlies all of modern physics and open the door to new discoveries when CERN’s giant collider switches on at higher power in 2015.

Cosmology can be viewed as geodesic motion in an appropriate metric on an 'augmented' target space; here we obtain these geodesics from an effective relativistic particle action. As an application, we find some exact (flat and curved) cosmologies for models with N scalar fields taking values in a hyperbolic target space for which the augmented target space is a Milne universe. The singularities of these cosmologies correspond to points at which the particle trajectory crosses the Milne horizon, suggesting a novel resolution of them, which we explore via the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.

The theoretical physicist Victor “Viki” Weisskopf, Director-General of CERN from 1961 to 1965, once “There are three kinds of physicists, namely the machine builders, the experimental physicists, and the theoretical physicists. […] The machine builders are the most important ones, because if they were not there, we would not get into this small-scale region of space. If we compare this with the discovery of America, the machine builders correspond to captains and ship builders who really developed the techniques at that time. The experimentalists were those fellows on the ships who sailed to the other side of the world and then landed on the new islands and wrote down what they saw. The theoretical physicists are those who stayed behind in Madrid and told Columbus that he was going to land in India.” Rather than focusing on the theoretical physicists, as most popular science books on particle physics do, this beautifully written and also entertaining book is different in that, firstly, the main foc...

In the background of a flat homogeneous and isotropic space-time, we consider a scenario of the Universe driven by the gravitationally induced ‘adiabatic’ particle production with constant creation rate. We have shown that this Universe attains a big bang singularity in the past and at late-time it asymptotically becomes de Sitter. To clarify this model Universe, we performed a dynamical analysis and found that the Universe attains a thermodynamic equilibrium in this late de Sitter phase. Finally, for the first time, we have discussed the possible effects of ‘adiabatic’ particle creations in the context of loop quantum cosmology.

In the background of a flat homogeneous and isotropic space–time, we consider a scenario of the Universe driven by the gravitationally induced ‘adiabatic’ particle production with constant creation rate. We have shown that this Universe attains a big bang singularity in the past and at late-time it asymptotically becomes de Sitter. To clarify this model Universe, we performed a dynamical analysis and found that the Universe attains a thermodynamic equilibrium in this late de Sitter phase. Finally, for the first time, we have discussed the possible effects of ‘adiabatic’ particle creations in the context of loop quantum cosmology. (paper)

The extremely low isotope ratio of 6 Li had remained as a drawback of the Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) until Pospelov proposed the 6 Li synthesis reaction catalyzed by negatively charged electroweak-scale particle X - in 2006. He remarked the catalytic enhancement of 6 Li production by about 10 8 times, as well as the life and initial abundance of X - . The present authors classified BBN catalyzed reaction into six types, i.e. (1) non-resonant transfer, (2) resonant transfer, (3) non-resonant radiative capture, (4) resonant radiative capture, (5) three-body breakup and (6) charge transfer reactions to predict absolute values of cross sections which cannot be observed experimentally. Starting from the three-body treatment for those reactions, 6 Li problems, the life-time and abundance of stau are discussed. Large change of element composition at 'late-time' big bang, generation of 9 Be by stau catalyzed reaction, 7 Li problem and stau catalyzed reactions are also discussed. Finally their relations with the supersymmetry theory and dark matter are mentioned. The basic nuclear calculations are providing quantitative base for the 'effect of nuclear reactions catalyzed by the supersymmetric particle stau on big bang nucleosynthesis'. (S. Funahashi)

This chapter considers the process of creation of particles with maximally big masses (maximons, intermediate bosons) in the nonstationary Universe within the framework of neutral and charged scalar field theory. The conclusions of the matter creation model for real particles (resonances) and hypothetical particles (maximons, friedmons, intermediate bosons) are analyzed. It is determined that if the mechanism of maximon's creation exists, then these particles must be stable. The maximons could be the final states of decaying black holes. A possible mechanism of cosmic ray creation as a result of ''vacuum'' generation of known unstable particles is discussed. The limits upon the mass and the life time of intermediate bosons are calculated. It is demonstrated that the creation of masses greater than 10 GeV, and with life times less than 10- 24 sec and quantity of elementary particles greater than 100 are in contradiction with the particle creation mechanism and the experimental mass density in the Universe. The formalism of the examined method and its vacuum properties are discussed in an appendix

Atmospheric soot particles are primary particles produced by incomplete combustion of biomass and/or fossil fuels. Thus soot mainly originates from anthropogenic emissions, stemming from combustion related processes in transport vehicles, industrial and residential uses. Such soot particles are generally complex mixtures of black carbon (BC) and organic matter (OM) (Bond et al., 2013; Petzold et al., 2013), depending on the sources and the interaction of the primary particles with other atmospheric matter and/or gases BC absorbs solar radiation having a warming effect on global climate. It can also act as a heterogeneous ice nucleating particle (INP) and thus impact cloud-radiation interactions, potentially cooling the climate (Lohmann, 2002). Previous studies, however, have shown conflicting results concerning the ice nucleation ability of soot, limiting the ability to predict its effects on Earth's radiation budget. Here we present a laboratory study where we systematically investigate the ice nucleation behavior of different soot particles. Commercial soot samples are used, including an amorphous, industrial carbon frequently used in coatings and coloring (FW 200, Orion Engineered Carbons) and a fullerene soot (572497 ALDRICH), e.g. used as catalyst. In addition, we use soot generated from a propane flame Combustion Aerosol Standard Generator (miniCAST, JING AG), as a proxy for atmospheric soot particles. The ice nucleation ability of these soot types is tested on size-selected particles for a wide temperature range from 253 K to 218 K, using the Horizontal Ice Nucleation Chamber (HINC), a Continuous Flow Diffusion Chamber (CFDC) (Kanji and Abbatt, 2009). Ice nucleation results from these soot surrogates will be compared to chemically more complex real world samples, collected on filters. Filters will be collected during the 2016/2017 winter haze periods in Beijing, China and represent atmospheric soot particles with sources from both industrial and residential

We study the effects of long-lived massive particles, which decayed during the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) epoch, on the primordial abundance of light elements. Compared to previous studies, (i) the reaction rates of standard BBN reactions are updated, (ii) the most recent observational data on the light element abundance and cosmological parameters are used, (iii) the effects of the interconversion of energetic nucleons at the time of inelastic scattering with background nuclei are considered, and (iv) the effects of the hadronic shower induced by energetic high-energy antinucleons are included. We compare the theoretical predictions on the primordial abundance of light elements with the latest observational constraints, and we derive upper bounds on the relic abundance of the decaying particle as a function of its lifetime. We also apply our analysis to an unstable gravitino, the superpartner of a graviton in supersymmetric theories, and obtain constraints on the reheating temperature after inflation.

While working at the University of California at Los Angeles, the author was asked to draft a paper on universal weak interactions. He identified four experiments which were the best candidates for proving the V-Α interaction. New results on these experiments confirmed the findings and his theory was published at the Padua-Venice conference, although neither he nor his collaborator, Marshak, are often credited with its discovery. He also devised the use of effective-mass plots to prove the existence of hadron resonances, such as two and three pion resonances. (UK)

The Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) process in the presence of charged massive particles (CHAMPs) is studied in detail. All currently known effects due to the existence of bound states between CHAMPs and nuclei, including possible late-time destruction of {sup 6}Li and {sup 7}Li, are included. The study sets conservative bounds on CHAMP abundances in the decay time range 3×10{sup 2} s∼particle parameter space, conservative constraints on the abundance of decaying charged particles are currently very close to those of neutral particles. It is shown that, in the case that the rates of a number of heretofore unconsidered reactions may be determined reliably in the future, it is conceivable that the limit on CHAMPs in the early Universe could be tightened by orders of magnitude.

The Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) process in the presence of charged massive particles (CHAMPs) is studied in detail. All currently known effects due to the existence of bound states between CHAMPs and nuclei, including possible late-time destruction of 6Li and 7Li, are included. The study sets conservative bounds on CHAMP abundances in the decay time range 3\\times 10^2~\\mathrm {s}\\lesssim \\tau_x\\lesssim 10^{12}~\\mathrm {s} . It is stressed that the production of 6Li at early times T~10 keV is overestimated by a factor ~10 when the approximation of the Saha equation for the 4He bound state fraction is utilized. To obtain conservative limits on the abundance of CHAMPs, a Monte Carlo analysis with ~3 × 106 independent BBN runs, varying the reaction rates of 19 different reactions, is performed. The analysis yields the surprising result that, except for small areas in the particle parameter space, conservative constraints on the abundance of decaying charged particles are currently very close to those of neutral particles. It is shown that, in the case that the rates of a number of heretofore unconsidered reactions may be determined reliably in the future, it is conceivable that the limit on CHAMPs in the early Universe could be tightened by orders of magnitude.

Numbers are fascinating. The fascination begins in childhood, when we first learn to count. It continues as we learn arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and so on. Eventually, we learn that numbers not only help us to measure the world, but also to understand it and, to some extent, to control it. In The Adventure of Numbers, Gilles Godefroy follows the thread of our expanding understanding of numbers to lead us through the history of mathematics. His goal is to share the joy of discovering and understanding this great adventure of the mind. The development of mathematics has been punctuated by a n

Title: Teamwork in Adventure racing Goals: The main goal is to make up the chapter about an ideal teamwork in Adventure racing. And so, to help starting teams but also help experienced teams to learn about their lacks in cooperation and to shift teamwork level above. Method: We used the method of literature retrieval from books, articles and researches. Results: It is very hard task to define ideal teamwork, we would not find same two teams in the world and therefore each team suits something...

Highlights of my biophysical and biomathematical adventures in radiobiology is presented. Early adventures involved developing ''state-vector models'' for specific harmful effects (cell killing, life shortening) of exposure to radiation. More recent adventures led to developing ''hazard-function models'' for predicting biological effects (e.g., cell killing, mutations, tumor induction) of combined exposure to different toxicants. Hazard-function models were also developed for predicting harm to man from exposure to large radiation doses. Major conclusions derived from the modeling adventures are as follows: (1) synergistic effects of different genotoxic agents should not occur at low doses; (2) for exposure of the lung or bone marrow to large doses of photon radiation, low rates of exposure should be better tolerated than high rates; and (3) for some types of radiation (e.g., alpha particles and fission neutrons), moderate doses delivered at a low rate may be more harmful than the same dose given at a high rate. 53 refs., 7 figs

Aspects of outdoor adventure education such as sport and risk are increasingly commercialized, whereas the core value of connection--to community, the environment, or other people--is being lost. A shift from providing challenge to encouraging exploration may enable programs emphasizing connection to find a home in the "third sector"…

Narratives of adventure constitute a well-established convention of describing travel experiences, yet the significance of this narrative genre in individuals’ accounts of their migration and life abroad has been little investigated. Drawing on Simmel and Bakhtin, among others, this article...

The primary aims of this study were to establish a client injury baseline for the New Zealand adventure tourism and adventure sport sector, and to examine patterns and trends in claims for injury during participation in adventure activities. Content analysis of narrative text data for compensated injuries occurring in a place for recreation and sport over a 12-month period produced over 15,000 cases involving adventure tourism and adventure sport. As found in previous studies in New Zealand, highest claim counts were observed for activities that are often undertaken independently, rather than commercially. Horse riding, tramping, surfing and mountain biking were found to have highest claim counts, while hang gliding/paragliding/parasailing and jet boating injuries had highest claim costs, suggesting greatest injury severity. Highest claim incidence was observed for horse riding, with female claimants over-represented for this activity. Younger male claimants comprised the largest proportion of adventure injuries, and falls were the most common injury mechanism.

The Volvo Ocean Adventure is a web-based international programme for schools and young scientists in the 10-16 age range which was established in June 2001 (www.volvooceanadventure.org). Using the Volvo Ocean Race as its focus it made use of environmental data colletced from the yachts in the round the World race to introduce the public to a wide range of marine environmental topics including pollution, global climate change and fisheries. As well as web-based activities for the class room a variety of "road" shows were established with the race along with an international competition to encourage active participation by young people. The Adventure involved input from over 50 scientists form around the World with the first phase finishing in September 2002. The successes and lessons learned will be presented by the science co-ordinators of the project.

Full Text Available Adventure learning (AL is an approach for the design of digitally-enhanced teaching and learning environments driven by a framework of guidelines grounded on experiential and inquiry-based education. The purpose of this paper is to review the adventure learning literature and to describe the status quo of the practice by identifying the current knowledge, misconceptions, and future opportunities in adventure learning. Specifically, the authors present an integrative analysis of the adventure learning literature, identify knowledge gaps, present future research directions, and discuss research methods and approaches that may improve the AL approach.The authors engaged in a systematic search strategy to identify adventure learning studies then applied a set of criteria to decide whether to include or exclude each study. Results from the systematic review were combined, analyzed, and critiqued inductively using the constant comparative method and weaved together using the qualitative metasynthesis approach.Results indicate the appeal and promise of the adventure learning approach. Nevertheless, the authors recommend further investigation of the approach. Along with studies that investigate learning outcomes, aspects of the AL approach that are engaging, and the nature of expert-learner collaboration, future adventure learning projects that focus on higher education and are (a small and (b diverse can yield significant knowledge into adventure learning. Research and design in this area will benefit by taking an activity theory and design-based research perspective.

When the discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN hit the headlines in 2012, the world was stunned by this achievement of modern science. Less well appreciated, however, were the many ways in which this benefited wider society. The Large Hadron Collider — The Greatest Adventure in Town charts a path through the cultural, economic and medical gains of modern particle physics. It illustrates these messages through the ATLAS experiment at CERN, one of the two big experiments which found the Higgs particle. Moving clear of in-depth physics analysis, it draws on the unparalleled curiosity about particle physics aroused by the Higgs discovery, and relates it to developments familiar in the modern world, including the Internet, its successor "The Grid", and the latest cancer treatments. In this book, advances made from developing the 27 kilometre particle accelerator and its detectors are presented with the benefit of first hand interviews and are extensively illustrated throughout. Interviewees are leading physicis...

The complete beginner's guide to Python, for young people whowant to start today Adventures in Python is designed for 11-to 15-year oldswho want to teach themselves Python programming, but don't knowwhere to start. Even if you have no programming experience at all,this easy to follow format and clear, simple instruction will getyou up and running quickly. The book walks you through nineprojects that teach you the fundamentals of programming in general,and Python in particular, gradually building your skills until youhave the confidence and ability to tackle your own projects. Videoclips accom

Start programming quickly with this super-fun guide to Raspberry Pi Adventures in Raspberry Pi, 2nd Edition includes 9 cool projects that show you how to set up and start developing on your Raspberry Pi. Updated for the release of the Rev 3 board, this second edition covers all the latest features and tells you everything you need to know. Written specifically for 11-15 year-olds, this book uses the wildly successful, Raspberry Pi to explain the fundamentals of computing. You'll have a blast learning basic programming and system administration skills, beginning with the very basics of how to p

In this paper we explore the notion of imprinting in the multinational corporation (MNC), specifically how during the brief period when foreign subsidiaries turn into technologically advanced units they are influenced by the technological activities carried out at headquarters and home country...... units. We hypothesize and empirically show that during that period of transition the degree of adventurousness or explorative intensity of home country units is replicated and has a long-lasting effect on the type of technological work carried out by the foreign subsidiaries. The results suggest...

A fascinating introduction to the basic principles of orbital mechanics. It has been three hundred years since Isaac Newton first formulated laws to explain the orbits of the Moon and the planets of our solar system. In so doing he laid the groundwork for modern science's understanding of the workings of the cosmos and helped pave the way to the age of space exploration. Adventures in Celestial Mechanics offers students an enjoyable way to become acquainted with the basic principles involved in the motions of natural and human-made bodies in space. Packed with examples in which these principle

A back-propagation (BP) neural network can solve complicated random nonlinear mapping problems; therefore, it can be applied to a wide range of problems. However, as the sample size increases, the time required to train BP neural networks becomes lengthy. Moreover, the classification accuracy decreases as well. To improve the classification accuracy and runtime efficiency of the BP neural network algorithm, we proposed a parallel design and realization method for a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-optimized BP neural network based on MapReduce on the Hadoop platform using both the PSO algorithm and a parallel design. The PSO algorithm was used to optimize the BP neural network's initial weights and thresholds and improve the accuracy of the classification algorithm. The MapReduce parallel programming model was utilized to achieve parallel processing of the BP algorithm, thereby solving the problems of hardware and communication overhead when the BP neural network addresses big data. Datasets on 5 different scales were constructed using the scene image library from the SUN Database. The classification accuracy of the parallel PSO-BP neural network algorithm is approximately 92%, and the system efficiency is approximately 0.85, which presents obvious advantages when processing big data. The algorithm proposed in this study demonstrated both higher classification accuracy and improved time efficiency, which represents a significant improvement obtained from applying parallel processing to an intelligent algorithm on big data.

It is difficult to examine different motivations and segment differentiations in niche markets such as adventure tourism seeing that it is not a well-defined segment in the discipline of tourism studies. In order to assist adventure tourism companies towards identifying and developing effective marketing strategies to attract or penetrate the adventure niche market, this study aims to contribute towards the current understanding of adventure tourists in Pretoria by compiling a demographic pro...

Adventure tourism is one of the key factors of the Nepalese tourism industry. The main aim of this bachelor’s thesis was to clarify the current situation and challenges for developing adventure tourism in Nepal and to evaluate the importance of appropriate marketing strategies. The thesis also focuses on promoting adventure tourism activities and rural tourism destinations. The objective of the thesis was to explore Dhorpatan Hunting Reserve as an adventure tourism destination at internationa...

The experiences found in adventure programs often parallel the archetypes depicted in mythological quests. Drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell, the stages and trials of adventure participants are compared to similar rites of passage and epic adventures experienced by heroes and heroines in epic literature and mythology. The basic pattern of…

This textbook acts as a pathway to higher mathematics by seeking and illuminating the connections between graph theory and diverse fields of mathematics, such as calculus on manifolds, group theory, algebraic curves, Fourier analysis, cryptography and other areas of combinatorics. An overview of graph theory definitions and polynomial invariants for graphs prepares the reader for the subsequent dive into the applications of graph theory. To pique the reader’s interest in areas of possible exploration, recent results in mathematics appear throughout the book, accompanied with examples of related graphs, how they arise, and what their valuable uses are. The consequences of graph theory covered by the authors are complicated and far-reaching, so topics are always exhibited in a user-friendly manner with copious graphs, exercises, and Sage code for the computation of equations. Samples of the book’s source code can be found at github.com/springer-math/adventures-in-graph-theory. The text is geared towards ad...

Our knowledge about the elementary particles stands before a revolution: With the biggest machine of mankind the legendary Higgs boson was discovered - and for its prediction the Nobel prize awarded. Other researchers search for antiparticles from the universe and the shadow regime of the dark matter. What has be happened after the big bang? How the components of the universe have been arised? Of which consists the world - and why it exists at all? Science reporter and cosmology specialist Ruediger Vaas bends the bow from the smallest of all to the largest of all. He analyzes the actual state of knowledge and reports about the search for a ''world formula'', which explains, what holds the universe together in the innermost. A unique excursion to the fronts of research.

High energy physics is a basic research domain with a well established European and international cooperation. Cooperation can be of different type depending on the size of the facilities involved (accelerators), on their financing, and on the type of experiments that use these facilities. The CERN, the European center for nuclear research, created in October 1954, is the best example of such a cooperation. This article examines first the juridical and scientifical structure of the CERN and the mode of organization of big experiments. Then, it presents the role of international committees in the establishment of a common scientific policy in Europe and in the rest of the world. Finally, the possible future evolution of the CERN towards a worldwide project is evoked. (J.S.)

Astronomy, like particle physics, has become Big Science where the demands of front line research can outstrip the science budgets of whole nations. Thus came into being the European Southern Observatory (ESO), founded in 1962 to provide European scientists with a major modern observatory to study the southern sky under optimal conditions.

This article contains the slides and transcript of a talk given by Dan Zaharevitz at the "Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future" symposium held at the University of Cambridge Department of Chemistry on 2011-01-19. A recording of the talk is available on the University Computing Service's Streaming Media Service archive at http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1095515 (unfortunately the first part of the recording was corrupted, so the talk appears to begin at slide 6, 'At a critical time'). We believe that Dan's message comes over extremely well in the textual transcript and that it would be poorer for serious editing. In addition we have added some explanations and references of some of the concepts in the slides and text. (Charlotte Bolton; Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge) EDITORIAL PREFACE: The following paper is part of a series of publications which arose from a Symposium held at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the lifetime achievements of Peter Murray-Rust. One of the motives of Peter's work was and is a better transport and preservation of data and information in scientific publications. In both respects the following publication is relevant: it is about public data and their representation, and the publication represents a non-standard experiment of transporting the content of the scientific presentation. As you will see, it consists of the original slides used by Dan Zaharevitz in his talk "Adventures in Public Data" at the Unilever Centre together with a diligent transcript of his speech. The transcribers have gone through great effort to preserve the original spirit of the talk by preserving colloquial language as it is used at such occasions. For reasons known to us, the original speaker was unable to submit the manuscript in a more conventional form. We, the Editors, have discussed in depth whether such a format is suitable for a scientific journal. We have eventually decided to publish this

Full Text Available Abstract This article contains the slides and transcript of a talk given by Dan Zaharevitz at the "Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future" symposium held at the University of Cambridge Department of Chemistry on 2011-01-19. A recording of the talk is available on the University Computing Service's Streaming Media Service archive at http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1095515 (unfortunately the first part of the recording was corrupted, so the talk appears to begin at slide 6, 'At a critical time'. We believe that Dan's message comes over extremely well in the textual transcript and that it would be poorer for serious editing. In addition we have added some explanations and references of some of the concepts in the slides and text. (Charlotte Bolton; Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge Editorial preface The following paper is part of a series of publications which arose from a Symposium held at the Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the lifetime achievements of Peter Murray-Rust. One of the motives of Peter's work was and is a better transport and preservation of data and information in scientific publications. In both respects the following publication is relevant: it is about public data and their representation, and the publication represents a non-standard experiment of transporting the content of the scientific presentation. As you will see, it consists of the original slides used by Dan Zaharevitz in his talk "Adventures in Public Data" at the Unilever Centre together with a diligent transcript of his speech. The transcribers have gone through great effort to preserve the original spirit of the talk by preserving colloquial language as it is used at such occasions. For reasons known to us, the original speaker was unable to submit the manuscript in a more conventional form. We, the Editors, have discussed in depth whether such a format is suitable for a scientific journal. We have eventually

Next summer, the Large Hadron Collider, Europe's $9 billion investment in particle physics, will take a handful of ions, hurt them through 17 miles of circular tunnel and smash them together so hard they will shatter into the finest atomic shards anyone has ever observed. (1 page)

Several chemical mutagens and carcinogens, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and nitrated PAHs, are adsorbed to the surface of diesel exhaust particles (DEP). DEP can induce formation of reactive oxygen species and cause oxidative DNA damage as well as bulky carcinogen DNA adducts....... Lung tissue is a target organ for DEP induced cancer following inhalation. Recent studies have provided evidence that the lung is also a target organ for DNA damage and cancer after oral exposure to other complex mixtures of PAHs. The genotoxic effect of oral administration of DEP was investigated...

Utilizing Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero's adventure, this article provides a technique through which clients can story their lives and challenges as an unfolding personal myth or epic adventure. The use of personal narrative and storytelling has found efficacy in the counseling field and, as such, forms a useful foundation for clinical…

The exponential growth in action and adventure sport (e.g. snowboarding, bicycle motorcross (BMX), surfing, parkour) participation over the past two decades has been showcased in world championship events and the inclusion in Olympic programs. Yet, by virtue of their alternative, escapist and/or adventure-based origins, these sports do not fully…

This paper calls attention to parallels in the literature of adventure education and that of Gestalt therapy, demonstrating that both are rooted in an experiential tradition. The philosophies of adventure or experiential education and Gestalt therapy have the following areas in common: (1) emphasis on personal growth and the development of present…

Many forms of adventure therapy, in particular wilderness therapy, rely on challenges in the outdoors to achieve objectives of client change. While nature is drawn on as a medium for therapy and healing, some adventure therapists give nature little if any mention when it comes to explaining therapeutic success. The dominant paradigm in psychology…

This book explains - in simple terms and with almost no math - the physics behind recent and glamorous discoveries in Cosmology, Quantum Mechanics, Elementary Particles (e.g. Higgs bosons) and Complexity Theory. En route it delves into the historical landmarks and revolutions that brought about our current understanding of the universe. The book is written mainly for those with little scientific background, both college students and lay readers alike, who are curious about the world of modern physics. Unsolved problems are highlighted and the philosophical implications of the sometimes astounding modern discoveries are discussed. Along the way the reader gains an insight into the mindset and methodology of a physicist.

The 6 Li abundance observed in metal-poor halo stars exhibits a plateau similar to that for 7 Li suggesting a primordial origin. However, the observed abundance of 6 Li is a factor of 10 3 larger and that of 7 Li is a factor of 3 lower than the abundances predicted in the standard big bang when the baryon-to-photon ratio is fixed by Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe. Here we show that both of these abundance anomalies can be explained by the existence of a long-lived massive, negatively charged leptonic particle during nucleosynthesis. Such particles would capture onto the synthesized nuclei thereby reducing the reaction Coulomb barriers and opening new transfer reaction possibilities, and catalyzing a second round of big bang nucleosynthesis. This novel solution to both of the Li problems can be achieved with or without the additional effects of stellar destruction

. Student will find answers to those questions by walking around that information point: the information is written in the info boards and hidden as chat-messages in different objects. After finding all the answers, students write them on a Note card and send that to the teacher. All of these tools work independently without teacher’s presence 24 hours a day, which is necessary as our students are mainly adults with jobs, children and busy lives. Adventure is a big part of the theme of our island and in our project the emphasis was on learning by experiencing. The literature history pathway needed to fit the general atmosphere of the island and every information point had to contain not only information but also humor and interesting details that help the student stay motivated and eager to learn more.One of the ways in which I hoped to create the feeling of an adventure is that all the information points are located on different places on the island; you cannot see the next information point from the previous one. A student follows the red brick path from one “classroom” into the other though forests, mountains and caves: the island around him is visually beautiful and versatile with plenty to see and experience. Sometimes it is also possible to add a little adventure with a simple decision: a student can choose alternative way of travelling. For instance, he can take a raft from Robinson Crusoe’s Island to the mainland or ride on a seahorse from Renaissance to Enlightenment.

Observations of metal poor halo stars exhibit a possible plateau of 6 Li abundance as a function of metallicity similar to that for 7 Li, suggesting a big bang origin. However, the inferred primordial abundance of 6 Li is ∼1000 times larger than that predicted by standard big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) for the baryon-to-photon ratio inferred from the WMAP data. On the other hand, the inferred 7 Li primordial abundance is about 3 times smaller than the prediction. We study a possible simultaneous solution to both the problems of underproduction of 6 Li and overproduction of 7 Li in BBN. This solution involves a hypothetical massive, negatively-charged leptonic particle that would bind to the light nuclei produced in BBN, but would decay long before it could be detected. Because the particle gets bound to the existing nuclei after the cessation of the usual big bang nuclear reactions, a second longer epoch of nucleosynthesis can occur among X-nuclei which have reduced Coulomb barriers. We numerically carry out a fully dynamical BBN calculation, simultaneously solving the recombination and ionization processes of negatively-charged particles by normal and X-nuclei as well as many possible nuclear reactions among them. We confirm that a reaction in which the hypothetical particle is transferred can occur that greatly enhance the production of 6 Li while a reaction through an atomic excited state of X-nucleus depletes 7 Li. It is confirmed that BBN in the presence of these hypothetical particles, together with or without an event of stellar burning process, can simultaneously solve the two Li abundance problems

The paper concerns the 'Big Bang' theory of the creation of the Universe 15 thousand million years ago, and traces events which physicists predict occurred soon after the creation. Unified theory of the moment of creation, evidence of an expanding Universe, the X-boson -the particle produced very soon after the big bang and which vanished from the Universe one-hundredth of a second after the big bang, and the fate of the Universe, are all discussed. (U.K.)

In the first volume on the ambiguous adventure of atom, the authors present the history of atom conquest with the discoveries of natural and artificial radioactivity and chain reactions, before to explain the first military uses

The book offers a timely snapshot of neural network technologies as a significant component of big data analytics platforms. It promotes new advances and research directions in efficient and innovative algorithmic approaches to analyzing big data (e.g. deep networks, nature-inspired and brain-inspired algorithms); implementations on different computing platforms (e.g. neuromorphic, graphics processing units (GPUs), clouds, clusters); and big data analytics applications to solve real-world problems (e.g. weather prediction, transportation, energy management). The book, which reports on the second edition of the INNS Conference on Big Data, held on October 23–25, 2016, in Thessaloniki, Greece, depicts an interesting collaborative adventure of neural networks with big data and other learning technologies.

Full Text Available The seven-adventures of Rostam, in particular, and other Iranian seven-adventures such as Esfandyar seven-adventures or Gorshasp pseudo-seven-adventures are a kind of eternity search, a kind of battle with selfhood that aims to facilitate the problems, the difficulties of evolution way and human ascent. By discussing and analyzing Iranian seven-adventures, this research aims to study the fourth adventure of all the seven-adventures, which is, at the surface, the battle between man (hero, champion and woman but, in essence, it is the battle between fire and water. Fire is the son of Ahura Mazda and water is its enemy. Water, which was at one time the symbol of holiness and purity of Ahura, became a satanic element during Sassanid era and following the dominance of Zorvani thoughts on religious system of that time. By analyzing Rostam, Esfandyar, Gorshasp, Heracles fourth adventure and looking at Zal and Roodabe stories, Khajavi Kermaniâs Sam-Nameh, Nezemiâs Khosro and Shirin and Mahmoud Dolatabadiâs Kalidar, we try to prove this hypothesis.

Full Text Available The plateau of 7Li abundance as a function of the iron abundance by spectroscopic observations of metal-poor halo stars (MPHSs indicates its primordial origin. The observed abundance levels are about a factor of three smaller than the primordial 7Li abundance predicted in the standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN model. This discrepancy might originate from exotic particle and nuclear processes operating in BBN epoch. Some particle models include heavy (m >> 1 GeV long-lived colored particles which would be confined inside exotic heavy hadrons, i.e., strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs. We have found reactions which destroy 7Be and 7Li during BBN in the scenario of BBN catalyzed by a long-lived sub-strongly interacting massive particle (sub-SIMP, X. The reactions are non radiative X captures of 7 Be and 7Li which can be operative if the X particle interacts with nuclei strongly enough to drive 7 Be destruction but not strongly enough to form a bound state with 4 He of relative angular momentum L = 1. We suggest that 7Li problem can be solved as a result of a new process beyond the standard model through which the observable signature was left on the primordial Li abundance.

The thesis, entitled "Analysis of supply adventure tourism in the South Bohemian Region" is to describe and analyze the options and instruments of tourism in selected destination. Work processes typology adventure tourism and also defines key terms related to this topic. It then focuses on identifying different types of adventure tourism, cooperation in the design of an appropriate design and implementation of a new product in the field of adventure tourism.

Women’s participation in adventure tourism is growing, yet few studies have explored this group of tourists. This conceptual paper seeks to extend our understanding of female adventure tourists by examining the empowering journey women can take through constraint negotiation to enjoy the benefits of adventure tourism. Using content analysis to review the literature on women’s adventure experiences in tourism and recreation settings reveals prominent themes that have been consolidated to propo...

The article traces the history of adventure games from the birth of the fantasy genre in William Morris' work and the origins of the Kriegspiel, through Tolkien's fantasy world and Dungeons and Dragons to the early text adventures and the first graphical adventures.

Injuries and fatalities among participants of adventure tourism activities have the potential to seriously impact on New Zealand's tourism industry. However, the absence of statistics for tourist accidents in New Zealand, and the lack of detailed academic research into adventure tourism safety, means the extent of the problem is unknown. The aims of the present study were to determine the incidence of client injuries across a range of adventure tourism activity sectors, and to identify common accident events and contributory risk factors. A postal questionnaire survey of New Zealand adventure tourism operators was used. Operators were asked to provide information related to their business; the number of recorded client injuries during the preceding 12 month period, January to December 1998; common accident and injury events associated with their activity; and perceived risk factors for accidents in their sector of the adventure tourism industry. The survey was responded to by 142 New Zealand adventure tourism operators. The operators' reported client injury experience suggests the incidence of serious client injuries is very low. Highest client injury incidence rates were found for activities that involved the risk of falling from a moving vehicle or animal (e.g., cycle tours, quad biking, horse riding, and white-water rafting). Slips, trips, and falls on the level were common accident events across most sectors of the industry. Perceived accident/incident causes were most commonly related to the client, and in particular, failure to attend to and follow instructions. The prevalence of client injuries in activity sectors not presently covered by government regulation, suggests policy makers should look again at extending codes of practice to a wider range of adventure tourism activities. Further research considering adventure tourism involvement in overseas visitor hospitalized injuries in New Zealand, is currently in progress. This will provide supporting evidence

George has problems. He has twin baby sisters at home who demand his parents’ attention. His beloved pig Freddy has been exiled to a farm, where he’s miserable. And worst of all, his best friend, Annie, has made a new friend whom she seems to like more than George. So George jumps at the chance to help Eric with his plans to run a big experiment in Switzerland that seeks to explore the earliest moment of the universe. But there is a conspiracy afoot, and a group of evildoers is planning to sabotage the experiment. Can George repair his friendship with Annie and piece together the clues before Eric’s experiment is destroyed forever? This engaging adventure features essays by Professor Stephen Hawking and other eminent physicists about the origins of the universe and ends with a twenty-page graphic novel that explains how the Big Bang happened—in reverse!

Full Text Available According to Jessica (2012 paintball is recognised as one of the world's most exciting outdoor participation sports. Paintball is played in over 104 countries by millions of men and women of all ages and lifestyles. Whether homemakers or high-school students, professionals or retirees, all paintball players share in common a love for adventure and a strong competitive spirit. Some confusion exists in industry and amongst players on whether paintball is and adventure or extreme sport as well as terminologies used. The article serves to analyse and clarify the unique terminologies used in paintball and debate classification of paintball as either an adventure or extreme sport. A detailed description of equipment used, player categories as well as formats that are employed are discussed so as to elucidate for readers who are unfamiliar with paintball.

Full Text Available The routine of everyday life, the stifling society, the desire of novel and unexpected alongside the unlimited access to information got the modern man on the threshold of a new experience: adventure. Within this context in the tourism industry one type of tourism seems to gain more and more followers: adventure tourism. The adventure tourism is a nature-based tourism involving challenging outdoors activities with a great potential of thrill and excitement. Thus, this paper aims to emphasise the potential for adventure tourism in Bihor County by highlighting the areas where activities related to adventure tourism are developed and to propose new itineraries.

Arduino Adventures: Escape from Gemini Station provides a fun introduction to the Arduino microcontroller by putting you (the reader) into the action of a science fiction adventure story. You'll find yourself following along as Cade and Elle explore Gemini Station-an orbiting museum dedicated to preserving and sharing technology throughout the centuries. Trouble ensues. The station is evacuated, including Cade and Elle's class that was visiting the station on a field trip. Cade and Elle don't make it aboard their shuttle and are trapped on the station along with a friendly artificial intellig

The main purpose of my diploma thesis is to create a scientific adventure based on the Newton's laws. My aim has been to introduce this topic to the kids in elementary school as well as the general public. That is why the adventure will take place in the House of Experiments. The first part is dedicated to theory and various experiments, which lead to deeper understanding of the laws. I implemented experiments on rollerblades, such as free movement, movement with the help of springs which wer...

Full Text Available The international adventure tourism literature is remarkably silent on the geographical nature of the industry. This study seeks to provide a geographical analysis of the sector within the context of South Africa. The spatial analysis was undertaken by metropolitan area, secondary towns and small towns, using a dataset of adventure tourism enterprises. It was found that the sector is spatially concentrated and highly urbanised, despite the perception that adventure tourism requires ‘wild’ and outdoor spaces. With many adventure tourism enterprises located in South Africa’s metropolitan areas, it is a hither too unknown sub-sector of the South African urban tourism market. Urban settlements with large populations and a strong general tourism sector form a significant support base for adventure tourism operators. Cape Town is the dominant adventure tourism destination, making it the adventure capital of South Africa. A few small settlements were found to be highly dependent upon the sector for survival.

, modern astronomy requires big data know-how, in particular it demands highly efficient machine learning and image analysis algorithms. But scalability is not the only challenge: Astronomy applications touch several current machine learning research questions, such as learning from biased data and dealing......, and highlight some recent methodological advancements in machine learning and image analysis triggered by astronomical applications....

In recent years, studies have repeatedly illustrated the significance of children seeing themselves reflected in careers and cultures that they may not typically identify with. The current lack of diversity in accessible media, however, limits the potential for self-reflection from children of different socioeconomic, racial, and gender identity backgrounds. This isolates substantial sections of our population from experiencing these moments of recognition and inspiration. As scientists in a rapidly evolving field that requires diversity in perspective and ideas, it is incumbent upon us to innovate new ways to engage with these future generations in the pursuit of inspiring future earth scientists. Inspired by the work of others (e.g. Doc McStuffins, The Sandwich Swap) and through a successful crowdfunding campaign, I was able to develop a project which integrates children's love of adventure with foundational critical thinking skills. That project is MD and Finn. MD and Finn is a self-written/published children's book series which was developed to address the lack of diversity in children's literature. MD is a little girl who continuously explores, discovers, and builds the world around her with her best friend, Finn the fox. They encourage one another to ask questions, brainstorm, make mistakes, and learn from absolutely everything. While the primary goal of the series is to create a character in which young girls can see themselves solving problems, learning from mistakes, and enjoying the little pieces of science in daily life, as the project progresses, characters from different races, ethnicities, gender identities, religions, and disabilities are purposefully introduced. In bringing these books to life, I have been given the unique opportunity to regularly engage with classrooms and families who may be meeting an actual scientist for the very first time. For a few young girls, they may also finally be seeing just a little bit of themselves - in a lab coat

With numerous entrepreneurs already established within the area, adventure tourism is a growing industry within Arctic Norway. The continuously expanding interest for the phenomenon has gained universities’ attention with recent education programs for guides being established. A cultural change involving a more professionalized approach to adventure tourism has also been noticed. At the forefront of ensuring tourists’ safety are the guides, who work in the area. In former research on safety i...

Insights from chaos theory--the interconnectedness of everything, nonlinear cause and effect, leverage and the "tipping point," and the importance of aligning interventions within a system--are applied to social action and illustrated via the role of adventure education in school and community interventions in the Brattleboro (Vermont) Leadership…

The Universe Adventure [ next ] [ home ] Go The Beginnings of Cosmology Since the beginning of of stars? What do the stars tell us about the future? Where did the Universe come from? Cosmology is will introduce you to Cosmology and the study of the structure, history, and fate of the Universe. In

Full Text Available Big data refers to the collection and aggregation of large quantities of data produced by and about people, things or the interactions between them. With the advent of cloud computing, specialised data centres with powerful computational hardware and software resources can be used for processing and analysing a humongous amount of aggregated data coming from a variety of different sources. The analysis of such data is all the more valuable to the extent that it allows for specific patterns to be found and new correlations to be made between different datasets, so as to eventually deduce or infer new information, as well as to potentially predict behaviours or assess the likelihood for a certain event to occur. This article will focus specifically on the legal and moral obligations of online operators collecting and processing large amounts of data, to investigate the potential implications of big data analysis on the privacy of individual users and on society as a whole.

" "Big science" is moving into astronomy, bringing large experimental teams, multi-year research projects, and big budgets. If this is the wave of the future, why are some astronomers bucking the trend?" (2 pages).

Full Text Available Adventure activities and experiences constantly evolve because individuals, motives, behaviours, and experiences differ and change over time. In order to assist adventure tourism companies to promote and sell specific activities and experiences that will meet the specific needs and wants of their identified target markets, this paper focuses on the demographic profile of adventure tourists who used the products/services of adventure tourism companies within Pretoria, South Africa. The realised sample was 234, providing a 93.6% response rate. The research instrument used was a self-completing questionnaire. Based on the results, these adventure tourists were Afrikaans speaking individuals between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-nine years. Their households consisted of two to four people and there were generally two income earners per household. This study established that there is a need for further researching of comprehensive adventure tourist profiles.

"Code is the 21st century literacy and the need for people to speak the ABCs of Programming is imminent." --Linda Liukas Meet Ruby--a small girl with a huge imagination. In Ruby's world anything is possible if you put your mind to it. When her dad asks her to find five hidden gems Ruby is determined to solve the puzzle with the help of her new friends, including the Wise Snow Leopard, the Friendly Foxes, and the Messy Robots. As Ruby stomps around her world kids will be introduced to the basic concepts behind coding and programming through storytelling. Learn how to break big problems into small problems, repeat tasks, look for patterns, create step-by-step plans, and think outside the box. With hands-on activities included in every chapter, future coders will be thrilled to put their own imaginations to work.

There is great potential for the development of adventure tourism in Southern Africa for a number of reasons. One is the variety of landscapes provided by South Africa's natural environment that are suitable for adventure tourism activities, many of which remain relatively pristine. In addition, the development of adventure tourism has significant potential to uplift local communities through local economic development strategies due to the relatively low capital needed to establish many acti...

The international adventure tourism literature is remarkably silent on the geographical nature of the industry. This study seeks to provide a geographical analysis of the sector within the context of South Africa. The spatial analysis was undertaken by metropolitan area, secondary towns and small towns, using a dataset of adventure tourism enterprises. It was found that the sector is spatially concentrated and highly urbanised, despite the perception that adventure tourism requires ‘wild’ and...

The routine of everyday life, the stifling society, the desire of novel and unexpected alongside the unlimited access to information got the modern man on the threshold of a new experience: adventure. Within this context in the tourism industry one type of tourism seems to gain more and more followers: adventure tourism. The adventure tourism is a nature-based tourism involving challenging outdoors activities with a great potential of thrill and excitement. Thus, this paper aim...

Full Text Available Adventure tourism is a growing sector within the tourism industry and understanding its dynamics is fundamental for adventure tourism destinations and their local authorities. Destination benchmarking is a strong tool to identify the performance of tourism services offered at the destination in order to design appropriate policies to improve its competitiveness. The benchmarking study of Suesca, an adventure tourism destination in Colombia, helps to identify the gaps compared with successful adventure tourism destinations around the world, and provides valuable information to local policy-makers on the features to be improved. The lack of available information to tourists and financial facilities hinders the capability of Suesca to improve its competitiveness.

with popular medievalism and the figure of the bold chivalric knight intersected with bourgeois forms of venture capitalism; the resulting children’s adventure narratives attempt to negotiate and even combine these two very different forms of risk-taking. Next, I will explore the rise of fantasy literature......This project will examine representations of risk in children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It will explore how issues of risk and trust have been mediated through children’s narratives, and how the adventurous child has served, and continues to serve...... for children following the Second World War. There are numerous overviews of trends within children’s literature during this period, but little exists that links these trends with their immediate sociocultural context and with changing attitudes towards childhood during the aftermath of the war...

Globalization can be thought of as the widening, deepening and quickening of the worldwide interconnections in social, cultural, political and economic life (Held et al., 1999). For adventure sports enthusiasts from the West, this has opened up the world for them to pursue their activities in more ‘exotic’ natural locations. Marketing of adventure holidays has increased with the greater ease of travelling to suitable geographical locations, providing apparently ‘authentic’ adventure experienc...

Full Text Available Tourism is a kind of human activity, which has the ability to simultaneously satisfy a wide human needs’ range and develop people’s personality. Adventure tourism term is a type of tourism able to fulfill these types of human needs. The aim of the study was to know the Polish tourists opinion about the adventure tourism in Poland. The study involved 50 people, taking into account their gender, age, education and occupational status. The research tool was a survey questionnaire. The study indicated that it is not a popular form of tourism in Poland. Its proponents, the information about places and facilities derive mainly from the Internet. The most popular forms are trekking, tramping, caves exploration, paintball, windsurfing, bungejumping and rafting. Rather average possibility of practicing the adventure tourism in Poland is associated with multitude barriers, mainly financial investments, lack of free time, as well as fear and general fear of some of its forms.

The aim of this study was to examine the involvement of adventure tourism and adventure sports activity in injury claims made to the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). Epidemiological analysis of ACC claims for the period, July 2004 to June 2005, where adventure activities were involved in the injury. 18,697 adventure tourism and adventure sports injury claims were identified from the data, representing 28 activity sectors. Injuries were most common during the summer months, and were most frequently located in the major population centres. The majority of injuries were incurred by claimants in the 20-50 years age groups, although claimants over 50 years of age had highest claims costs. Males incurred 60% of all claims. Four activities (horse riding, mountain biking, tramping/hiking, and surfing) were responsible for approximately 60% of all adventure tourism and adventure sports-related injuries. Slips, trips, and falls were the most common injury initiating events, and injuries were most often to the back/spine, shoulder, and knee. These findings suggest the need to investigate whether regulatory intervention in the form of codes of practice for high injury count activities such as horse riding and mountain biking may be necessary. Health promotion messages and education programs should focus on these and other high-injury risk areas. Improved risk management practices are required for commercial adventure tourism and adventure sports operators in New Zealand if safety is to be improved across this sector.

In a popular class of models, dark matter comprises an asymmetric population of composite particles with short range interactions arising from a confined nonabelian gauge group. We show that coupling this sector to a well-motivated light mediator particle yields efficient darkleosynthesis , a dark-sector version of big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), in generic regions of parameter space. Dark matter self-interaction bounds typically require the confinement scale to be above ΛQCD , which generica...

The role of the adventure sports coach was first identified by Collins and Collins (2012) who suggested that the sports coaching process is significantly different in an adventurous context. Whilst there is a growing body of literature surrounding coaching pedagogy (Hay, Dickens, Crudginton, & Engstrom, 2012), investigation of coaching…

This study examined whether participation in an adventure program increased the resiliency of adolescent girls. Eighty-seven girls who participated in Dirt Divas, a non-profit, adventure program, completed the Resiliency Scale for Children and Adolescents® before and after their experience. Means-comparison tests for within-subjects designs were…

Adventure tourism is a rapidly growing segment of the tourism industry, which can be regarded as specific activities that are alluring for their uncertain and potentially dangerous outcomes. Risk-taking attitudes and behaviors may be common among adventure recreationists and increase the potential for litigation against recreation operators. In…

This paper examines the importance of the therapeutic relationship and the need for cultural competence in adventure therapy. Cultural differences between therapist and client can sometimes result in possible misinterpretation and conflict, which can lead to problems in the therapeutic relationship and negatively affect treatment outcomes. This…

In two articles on outdoor programming models, Watters distinguished four models on a continuum ranging from the common adventure model, with minimal organizational structure and leadership control, to the guide service model, in which leaders are autocratic and trips are highly structured. Club programs and instructional programs were in between,…

Development in China raises the question of how big a city can become, and at the same time be sustainable, writes Christer Ljungwall of the Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis.......Development in China raises the question of how big a city can become, and at the same time be sustainable, writes Christer Ljungwall of the Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis....

Full Text Available Big Data is nothing new. Public concern regarding the mass diffusion of data has appeared repeatedly with computing innovations, in the formation before Big Data it was most recently referred to as the information explosion. In this essay, I argue that the appeal of Big Data is not a function of computational power, but of a synergistic relationship between aesthetic order and a politics evacuated of a meaningful public deliberation. Understanding, and challenging, Big Data requires an attention to the aesthetics of data visualization and the ways in which those aesthetics would seem to depoliticize information. The conclusion proposes an alternative argumentative aesthetic as the appropriate response to the depoliticization posed by the popular imaginary of Big Data.

is to outline a research agenda that can be used to raise a broader set of sociological and practice-oriented questions about the increasing datafication of international relations and politics. First, it proposes a way of conceptualizing big data that is broad enough to open fruitful investigations......The claim that big data can revolutionize strategy and governance in the context of international relations is increasingly hard to ignore. Scholars of international political sociology have mainly discussed this development through the themes of security and surveillance. The aim of this paper...... into the emerging use of big data in these contexts. This conceptualization includes the identification of three moments contained in any big data practice. Second, it suggests a research agenda built around a set of subthemes that each deserve dedicated scrutiny when studying the interplay between big data...

Media Clips appears in every issue of Mathematics Teacher, offering readers contemporary, authentic applications of quantitative reasoning based on print or electronic media. This issue features "How Big is Too Big?" (Margaret Cibes and James Greenwood) in which students are asked to analyze the data and tables provided and answer a…

This survey examined parameters of the New Zealand adventure tourism industry client injury risk. The research also sought to establish priorities for intervention to reduce adventure tourism risk, and identify client injury control measures currently in place (or absent) in the New Zealand adventure tourism industry, with a view to establishing guidelines for the development of effective adventure tourism safety management systems. This 2003 survey builds upon an exploratory study of New Zealand adventure tourism safety conducted by us during 1999. A postal questionnaire was used to survey all identifiable New Zealand adventure tourism operators. The questionnaire asked respondents about their recorded client injury experience, perceptions of client injury risk factors, safety management practices, and barriers to safety. Some 27 adventure tourism activities were represented among the responding sample (n=96). The highest client injury risk was reported in the snow sports, bungee jumping and horse riding sectors, although serious underreporting of minor injuries was evident across the industry. Slips, trips and falls (STF) were the major client injury mechanisms, and a range of risk factors for client injuries were identified. Safety management measures were inconsistently applied across the industry. The industry should consider the implications of poor injury reporting standards and safety management practices generally. Specifically, the industry should consider risk management that focuses on minor (e.g., STF) as well as catastrophic events.

This paper presents the role of big laboratories in their function as research infrastructures. Starting from the general definition and features of big laboratories, the paper goes on to present the key ingredients and issues, based on scientific excellence, for the successful realization of large-scale science projects at such facilities. The paper concludes by taking the example of scientific research in the field of particle physics and describing the structures and methods required to be implemented for the way forward.

This paper presents the role of big laboratories in their function as research infrastructures. Starting from the general definition and features of big laboratories, the paper goes on to present the key ingredients and issues, based on scientific excellence, for the successful realization of large-scale science projects at such facilities. The paper concludes by taking the example of scientific research in the field of particle physics and describing the structures and methods required to be implemented for the way forward. (paper)

Presents the ninth story in a series of chemical mysteries with emphasis on forensic chemistry, physical properties, and qualitative organic analysis. The mystery centers around the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (DDR)

The quantum fluctuations of a homogeneous, isotropic, open pre-big bang model are discussed. By solving exactly the equations for tensor and scalar perturbations we find that particle production is negligible during the perturbative Pre-Big Bang phase

This book reveals the secrets of the French strike force: the formidable adventure which provided France with first ranking strategic forces, the incredible fight given by Europe and the European Commission states to prohibit France from acquiring nuclear weapons, the US ambiguous game of accompanying France in her nuclear adventure in order to better monitor her, the core of deterrence with its doctrine of use, and for the future, the measures which will make French deterrence a decisive tool for worldwide peace

Full Text Available This study discusses and examines potential identification and package tour in Tabanan regency. Qualitative approaches were applied in this research. The data were collected by using observation techniques, in-depths interviews, and documentation technique. Informant and key informant techniques were used to determine the informantion. This study used descriptive qualitative data analysis techniques with three steps which are data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing. In this study, showed potential identifications taken place in Alas Kedaton, Jatiluwih, Batukaru Temple, Subak Museum, and Tengkudak Village. The packaging of this package tour with itinerary such as visit the Subak Museum, Tengkudak village adventure, visit Jatiluwih, sightseeing in Batukaru temple, sightseeing in Alas Kedaton and shopping in Krisna oleh-oleh. This package tour was presented in tabulated style, Graphic style as well as the calculation of travel costs.

Well-designed astronomical surveys are powerful and have consistently been keystones of scientific progress. The Byurakan Surveys using a Schmidt telescope with an objective prism produced a list of about 3000 UV-excess Markarian galaxies but these objects have stimulated an enormous amount of further study and appear in over 16,000 publications. The CFHT Legacy Surveys used a wide-field imager to cover thousands of square degrees and those surveys are mentioned in over 1100 publications since 2002. Both ground and space-based astronomy have been increasing their investments in survey work. Survey instrumentation strives toward fair samples and large sky coverage and therefore strives to produce massive datasets. Thus we are faced with the "big data" problem in astronomy. Survey datasets require specialized approaches to data management. Big data places additional challenging requirements for data management. If the term "big data" is defined as data collections that are too large to move then there are profound implications for the infrastructure that supports big data science. The current model of data centres is obsolete. In the era of big data the central problem is how to create architectures that effectively manage the relationship between data collections, networks, processing capabilities, and software, given the science requirements of the projects that need to be executed. A stand alone data silo cannot support big data science. I'll describe the current efforts of the Canadian community to deal with this situation and our successes and failures. I'll talk about how we are planning in the next decade to try to create a workable and adaptable solution to support big data science.

We consider quantum field theory on a spacetime representing the big-crunch-big-bang transition postulated in ekpyrotic or cyclic cosmologies. We show via several independent methods that an essentially unique matching rule holds connecting the incoming state, in which a single extra dimension shrinks to zero, to the outgoing state in which it reexpands at the same rate. For free fields in our construction there is no particle production from the incoming adiabatic vacuum. When interactions are included the particle production for fixed external momentum is finite at the tree level. We discuss a formal correspondence between our construction and quantum field theory on de Sitter spacetime

Against the backdrop of the ever-increasing influx of big data, this article examines the opportunities and concerns over big data in education. Specifically, this article first introduces big data, followed by delineating the potential opportunities of using big data in education in two areas: learning analytics and educational policy. Then, the…

After a brief recall on the classification of subatomic particles, this paper deals with quark nuggets, particle with more than three quarks, a big bag, which is called ''nuclearite''. Neutron stars, in fact, are big sacks of quarks, gigantic nuggets. Now, physicists try to calculate which type of nuggets of strange quark matter is stable, what has been the influence of quark nuggets on the primordial nucleosynthesis. At the present time, one says that if these ''nuggets'' exist, and in a large proportion, they may be candidates for the missing mass [fr

The Keen Johnson Building is symbolic of Eastern Kentucky University's historic role as a School of Opportunity. It is a place that has inspired generations of students, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, to dream big dreams. The construction of the Keen Johnson Building was inspired by a desire to create a student union facility that would not…

A constraints-based framework enables a new understanding of expertise in outdoor adventure sports by considering performer-environment couplings through emergent and self-organizing behaviours in relation to interacting constraints. Expert adventure athletes, conceptualized as complex, dynamical

Full Text Available DNA sequencers, Twitter, MRIs, Facebook, particle accelerators, Google Books, radio telescopes, Tumblr: what do these things have in common? According to the evangelists of “data science,” all of these are instruments for observing reality at unprecedentedly large scales and fine granularities. This perspective ignores the social reality of these very different technological systems, ignoring how they are made, how they work, and what they mean in favor of an exclusive focus on what they generate: Big Data. But no data, big or small, can be interpreted without an understanding of the process that generated them. Statistical data science is applicable to systems that have been designed as scientific instruments, but is likely to lead to confusion when applied to systems that have not. In those cases, a historical inquiry is preferable.

In this paper we investigate the micro-mechanisms governing structural evolution and performance of scientific collaboration. Scientific discovery tends not to be lead by so called lone ?stars?, or big egos, but instead by collaboration among groups of researchers, from a multitude of institutions...

Brief introduction to the challenges of big data in scientific research based on the work done by the HEP community at CERN and how the CERN openlab promotes collaboration among research institutes and industrial IT companies. Presented at the FutureGov 2014 conference in Singapore.

This essay proposes that stress has been misused in traditional adventure education and presents a new model of risk taking based on the literature on stress and feminist perspectives in adventure education. Proponents of the traditional adventure perspective state that the intentional use of stress is central to the change process in wilderness…

Outdoor adventure may improve body image. However, minimal research exists on the effect outdoor adventure has on body image in adolescent girls, a demographic continually plagued by negative body image. In response, this exploratory study considered the influence of one outdoor adventure program in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through…

The recently published report entitled 'The Big Public Inquiry' from the Council for Science and Society and the Outer Circle Policy Unit is considered, with especial reference to any future enquiry which may take place into the first commercial fast breeder reactor. Proposals embodied in the report include stronger rights for objectors and an attempt is made to tackle the problem that participation in a public inquiry is far too late to be objective. It is felt by the author that the CSS/OCPU report is a constructive contribution to the debate about big technology inquiries but that it fails to understand the deeper currents in the economic and political structure of technology which so influence the consequences of whatever formal procedures are evolved.

The term 'Big Data' portrays inventive methods and advances to catch, store, disseminate, oversee and break down petabyte-or bigger estimated sets of data with high-speed & diverted structures. Enormous information can be organized, non-structured or half-organized, bringing about inadequacy of routine information administration techniques. Information is produced from different distinctive sources and can touch base in the framework at different rates. With a specific end goal to handle this...

Full Text Available Cyanobacteria, or the blue-green algae as they used to be called until 1974, are the oldest oxygenic photosynthesizers. We summarize here adventures with them since the early 1960s. This includes studies on light absorption by cyanobacteria, excitation energy transfer at room temperature down to liquid helium temperature, fluorescence (kinetics as well as spectra and its relationship to photosynthesis, and afterglow (or thermoluminescence from them. Further, we summarize experiments on their two-light reaction - two-pigment system, as well as the unique role of bicarbonate (hydrogen carbonate on the electron acceptor side of their photosystem II, PSII. This review, in addition, includes a discussion on the regulation of changes in phycobilins (mostly in PSII and chlorophyll a (Chl a; mostly in photosystem I, PSI under oscillating light, on the relationship of the slow fluorescence increase (the so-called S to M rise, especially in the presence of diuron in minute time scale with the so-called state-changes, and on the possibility of limited oxygen evolution in mixotrophic PSI (minus mutants, up to 30 minutes, in the presence of glucose. We end this review with a brief discussion on the position of cyanobacteria in the evolution of photosynthetic systems.

A brief introduction to the big bang picture of the early universe is given. Dark matter is discussed; particularly its implications for elementary particle physics. A classification scheme for dark matter relics is given. 21 refs., 11 figs., 1 tab

A brief introduction to the big bang picture of the early universe is given. Dark matter is discussed; particularly its implications for elementary particle physics. A classification scheme for dark matter relics is given. 21 refs., 11 figs., 1 tab.

The enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Inside the black box of data are a plethora of research, technology, and policy issues. Data are not shiny objects that are easily exchanged. Rather, data are representations of observations, objects, or other entities used as evidence of phenomena for the purposes of research or scholarship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to indiv...

Full Text Available The article discusses issues related to the creative process and the editorial fate of The Adventures of Matołek the Billy-Goat by Kornel Makuszyński. It contains collected informations on the appearance of an idea for a book-comic for children (as told by Makuszyński’s wife – Janina, Marian Walentynowicz, Jan Gebethner, through the actual process of writing, the first edition and post-war issue. Also it discusses drawings from The 120 adventures of Matołek the Billy-Goat which sometimes differ quite significantly depending on the edition.

Full Text Available The article is a synthetic analysis of the Outdoor Adventure Education model in the context of three elementary components: the environment – in relation to the theory of space from the perspective of sociological and pedagogical theory of space; personal perspective and growth as well as social development – in relation to psychological phenomena that accompany the individual and group involved in the process of Outdoor Adventure Education. The aim is to present how these processes determine the effects of education and what personalities’ elements are involved.

Networking for Big Data supplies an unprecedented look at cutting-edge research on the networking and communication aspects of Big Data. Starting with a comprehensive introduction to Big Data and its networking issues, it offers deep technical coverage of both theory and applications.The book is divided into four sections: introduction to Big Data, networking theory and design for Big Data, networking security for Big Data, and platforms and systems for Big Data applications. Focusing on key networking issues in Big Data, the book explains network design and implementation for Big Data. It exa

The Interstellar Gas Experiment (IGE) is designed to collect particles of the interstellar gas - a wind of interstellar media particles moving in the vicinity of the solar system. These particles will be returned to earth where the isotopic ratios of the noble gases among these particles will be measured. IGE was designed and programmed to expose 7 sets of six copper-beryllium metallic collecting foils to the flux of neutral interstellar gas particles which penetrate the heliosphere to the vicinity of the earth's orbit. These particles are trapped in the collecting foils and will be returned to earth for mass-spectrographic analysis when Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) on which IGE was launched, is recovered.

Full Text Available Different adventure activities/experiences evolve because individuals, their motives, behaviours, and experiences differ and change over time. This notion illustrates the broad nature of adventure tourism and its links with other forms of tourism. In turn, adventure tourism companies are compelled to promote/sell an array of activities/experiences to a diverse range of markets as novel and exclusive experiences to facilitate the growth of adventure holidays (Swarbrooke et al., 2003. To assist adventure tourism companies in achieving effective marketing strategies, the study’s objective is to identify significant sociopsychological profile differences among male and female adventure tourists in Pretoria, South Africa. Furthermore, to facilitate the comparison of adventure tourists’ profiles, an equal number of respondents were male (117 and female (117, which provided a 93.6% response rate. In comparison to female respondents, male respondents prefer winter as a season to participate in hard/high-risk adventure activities when they are with or without their family, and they participate in adventure activities for travelling and socialising purposes. Whereas, female respondents predominantly regard scuba-diving, abseiling, and helicopter flights as a hard/high-risk adventure activity, although these activities are generally regarded by the overall sample as being soft/low-risk adventure activities. Furthermore, even though females’ participation in adventure activities is sponsored, they did not participate or only participated in adventure activities once over the past year due to fear/risk and/or lack of skill. This study established that there is a need to further research adventure tourists’ profiles before it could be equally accepted and interpreted.

Unique insights to implement big data analytics and reap big returns to your bottom line Focusing on the business and financial value of big data analytics, respected technology journalist Frank J. Ohlhorst shares his insights on the newly emerging field of big data analytics in Big Data Analytics. This breakthrough book demonstrates the importance of analytics, defines the processes, highlights the tangible and intangible values and discusses how you can turn a business liability into actionable material that can be used to redefine markets, improve profits and identify new business opportuni

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of an adventure based experiential learning programme (AEP) in developing the life effectiveness of black high school learners. “Life Effectiveness” reflects the psychological and behavioural aspects of human functioning which determine the proficiency of a person in society.

Relationships are a critical component to the experience of an outdoor adventure education (OAE) program, therefore, more fruitful ways of investigating groups is needed. Social network analysis (SNA) is an effective tool to study the relationship structure of small groups. This paper provides an explanation of SNA and shows how it was used by the…

The democratization efforts of the 1990s in West Africa appeared to have put paid to military political adventurism which had been the plague of that region since independence in the 1960s. But since the year 2000 there has been a resurgence of military intervention in the politics of some West African states and this calls ...

To answer calls for an ecological approach to outdoor adventure that can respond to the crisis of sustainability, this paper suggests greater theoretical and empirical attention to skill and skill development as shaping participant interactions with and experiences of environments, landscapes, places, and inhabitants. The paper reviews calls for…

In response to the crisis of sustainability, this paper revisits understandings of human--environment relations established through skill-based outdoor activities that are used commonly among adventure recreation, education, and tourism. Reconsidering a predominant focus on risk and a persistent tension between technical and environmental…

Adventure sports tourism has shown consistent growth during the last several decades as a leisure activity that stands as an antithesis of traditional leisure tourism. ... An exploratory factor analysis on the leisure aspects of paintball, positive sport lifestyle, leisure and recreation life domain positive/negative effect and quality ...

This paper advocates the potentials of "sweat lodge" rituals for adventure education programs. Historically, rituals and ceremonies have been instrumental in passing major philosophical and sociological paradigms from one generation to the next. However, there is little theory and research about how ritual and ceremony results in the…

Spion, an adventure game for intermediate and advanced college German students, requires players to communicate with a fictitious agent in complete, correct German sentences. The spy game was written in PROLOG, runs on an IBM-PC, and is available at no cost for noncommercial purposes. (Author/CB)

Learners thrive when they have the capacity to regulate interest and goal direction. Through direct experiences that are interesting and goal-relevant, learners can internalize and better understand their own agency in the learning process. This article further examines this premise in an outdoor adventure education (OAE) context through two…

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contains many incidents of medical interest. While disorders of the cardiovascular system do not play an important role in these tales, there are, nevertheless, some illnesses that invite speculation. Eleven such incidents are reviewed and discussed in light of the times in which they occurred and in light of current medical knowledge.

This qualitative study explored the substantive issues and challenges faced by Physical Education teachers in delivering adventure education in the context of Botswana junior secondary schools. In the first stage of the study, 22 respondents completed a semi-structured questionnaire requesting information pertaining to the ...

The purpose of the study was to determine the effectiveness of Adventure-based Experiential Learning (AEL) in developing the personal effectiveness of adolescents. Twenty three adolescents, currently enrolled in a post-matriculation development centre were studied. The study consisted of an experimental (n=12) and ...

Describes a CD-ROM adventure story written by the author to educate her students about the word relationships of synonyms and antonyms. Discusses how this interactive medium put a different twist on each of the stages of the writing process itself. Relates how two students enthusiastically used the program, and were inspired to write one of their…

We report on an environmental scan (ES) of adventure therapy (AT) literature, organizations, and activities in Canada. The ES methodology involved (a) an examination of final reports related to a series of national symposiums on AT in Canada, (b) a review of academic literature related to AT in Canada, and (c) a summary of AT programs and courses…

An intact work unit of 17 corporate managers participated in a 3-day adventure training program to develop teamwork and group unity. The unit improved significantly on 8 of 10 items of the Team Development Inventory, administered before and 2 months after training, relative to an intact control group. (SV)

This paper indicates how modern spatial computing technology can be used for developing spatial policy for, and planning of outdoor action and adventure recreation and tourism (OAART). An application was performed in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The research overviews spatial recreation and tourism ...

Explores reasons why "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been continuously censored from its publication in 1885 to present. Historical precedents for censorship of library materials in the United States and specific censorship attempts are discussed. Controversial passages are examined in light of both praise and criticism.…

Small-group development is an important aspect of adventure therapy. Supplementing knowledge of sequential stages of group development with knowledge concerning within-stage nonsequential development yields a richer understanding of groups. Integrating elements of the individual counseling relationship (working alliance, transference, and real…

Adventure sport coaches practice in environments that are dynamic and high in risk, both perceived and actual. The inherent risks associated with these activities, individuals' responses and the optimal exploitation of both combine to make the processes of risk management more complex and hazardous than the traditional sports where risk management…

Many components of the social system interact with one another to produce group-level behavior that determines the functionality of the small group in outdoor adventure education (OAE). This article synthesizes the contemporary literature and theory regarding eight aspects of the OAE social system: (a) Macro Contextual Factors, (b) Student…

Our knowledge about the elementary particles stands before a revolution: With the biggest machine of mankind the legendary Higgs boson was discovered - and for its prediction the Nobel prize awarded. Other researchers search for antiparticles from the universe and the shadow regime of the dark matter. What has be happened after the big bang? How the components of the universe have been arised? Of which consists the world - and why it exists at all? Science reporter and cosmology specialist Ruediger Vaas bends the bow from the smallest of all to the largest of all. He analyzes the actual state of knowledge and reports about the search for a ''world formula'', which explains, what holds the universe together in the innermost. A unique excursion to the fronts of research.

The role of Geosciences in our society is of primary importance. Its implications for humanity relate to major challenges such as climate change, managing energy resources, natural hazard mitigation, and water scarcity. Despite these issues being familiar to specialists, this is in general not the case for the public. In a world, where the impact of human activity is beginning to be seen on the environment, knowledge of the Earth and its history is paramount to make informed decisions that will influence our future. The necessity to educate the global population and raise awareness of Geosciences has led UNESCO to designate 2009 the International Year of the Planet Earth. In this context and with the label of the UNESCO, we organized and performed a popular science adventure that was followed in real time by both school children and many adults around the world. The Andean Geotrail consisted of a cycling expedition through a spectacular geological environment, the Andean Cordillera. During the nine month expedition, we cycled 8000 km and walked 400 km from Ushuaia in the Southern tip of Argentina to Nazca in Peru to encounter a rich variety of geological environments: active volcanoes, earthquakes, mineral and hydrocarbon deposits, and fantastic geological scenery. All this makes the Andes a great pedagogical natural laboratory. During the expedition, we visited spectacular geological localities that illustrate key Earth Science phenomena (such as mines and hydrocarbon deposits, erupting volcanoes and seismogenically active areas, and national parks) and discovered their implications for the local people. Along the way, we interviewed local geologists and scientists who helped us understand the geology of their areas. We gathered our own observations with those of the local specialists and published essays, articles and photographs on our website and blog (www.georouteandine.fr/English, http://georouteandine.blogspot.com). Seventeen schools in France and Norway

Recently the Centre for Program Evaluation (CPE) at the University of Melbourne was approached by a mental health agency to undertake the unique and challenging task of evaluating a prototype CD-ROM based adventure game designed for young people recovering from psychosis. This unusual and inventive game, titled Pogo's Pledge, used…

Multiple trigger scintillators were installed: big ones covering the total surface of the sensor and several smaller ones. The former give a trigger for each beam particle. The latter are used to select a part of the sensor surface for efficiency measurements.

RAHI, the Rural Alaska Honors Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks began in 1983 after a series of meetings between the Alaska Federation of Natives and the University of Alaska, to discuss the retention rates of Alaska Native and rural students. RAHI is a six-week college-preparatory summer bridge program on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus for Alaska Native and rural high school juniors and seniors. The program's student body is approximately 94 percent Alaska Native. RAHI students take classes that earn them seven to ten college credits, thus giving them a head start on college. Courses include: writing, study skills, desk top publishing, Alaska Native dance or swimming, and a choice of biochemistry, math, business, or engineering. A program of rigorous academic activity combines with social, cultural, and recreational activities to make up the RAHI program of early preparation for college. Students are purposely stretched beyond their comfort levels academically and socially to prepare for the big step from home or village to a large culturally western urban campus. They are treated as honors students and are expected to meet all rigorous academic and social standards set by the program. All of this effort and activity support the principal goal of RAHI: promoting academic success for rural students in college. Over 26 years, 1,200 students have attended the program. Sixty percent of RAHI's alumni have entered four-year academic programs. Over 245 have earned a bachelor's degree, thirty-one have earned master's degrees, and seven have graduated with professional degrees (J.D., Pharm., or M.D.), along with 156 associate degrees and certificates. In looking at the RAHI cohort, removing those students who have not been in college long enough to obtain a degree, 27.3 percent of RAHI alums have received a bachelor's degree. An April 2006 report by the American Institutes for Research through the National Science Foundation found that: Rural

The paper reports findings from a multidisciplinary programme of research, the major aims of which were to determine the nature and extent of the New Zealand adventure tourism injury problem. Analysis of hospital discharge and mortality data for a 15-year period identified adventure tourism-related activities as contributing to approximately 20% of overseas visitor injuries, and 22% of fatalities. Activities that commonly involve independent-unguided adventure tourism, notably mountaineering, skiing and tramping, contributed most to injury and fatality incidence. Horse riding and cycling activities were identified from hospital discharge data and adventure tourism operators' reported client injury-incidence, as the commercial adventure tourism activities most frequently involved in client injuries. Falls were the most common injury events, and a range of client, equipment, environmental and organisational risk factors were identified. Possible interventions to reduce injury risk among overseas and domestic adventure tourists are discussed.

The influence of life on geomorphic processes is commonly inferred from correlations between the size and abundance of individual organisms and the change in process thresholds and rates from abiotic conditions. However, to understand and model the underlying mechanisms, it is helpful to make direct measurements of the forces acting between organisms and the earth materials they inhabit. For example, flume studies have found that the presence of net-spinning caddisfly larvae (Trichoptera: Hydropsychidae) can increase the shear stress required to initiate particle motion by more than a factor of two, with potentially significant implications for the timing and magnitude of bedload sediment transport in gravel-bedded rivers. To explore the underlying mechanics we conducted flume experiments at the Stroud Water Research center in Avonadale, Pennsylvania, using strain gages to measure the forces acting between caddisfly nets and sediment particles of various sizes, during the process of initial particle motion. We combine these measurements with high-speed video images to document for the first time, the three dimensional dynamics of net stretching, tearing, and detachment that govern the magnitude of the increase in critical shear stress. We are using these data and insights to substantially improve a previously published theoretical model for the mechanics of sediment stabilization by caddisfly larvae. In particular, we seek to constrain the range of particle sizes potentially stabilized by caddisfly larvae and explain mechanistically why the effect of caddisfly nets varies with particle size. These predictions have implications for understanding feedbacks between bed stabilization by caddisflies, insect density, inter-specific niche partitioning, and the movement of sediment that shapes gravel-bed channels.

A LIVELY EXPLORATION OF THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS IN SCIENCE How Did the Universe Begin? The Big Bang has been the accepted theory for decades, but does it explain everything? How Did Life on Earth Get Started? What triggered the cell division that started the evolutionary chain? Did life come from outer space, buried in a chunk of rock? What is Gravity? Newton's apple just got the arguments started, Einstein made things more complicated. Just how does gravity fit in with quantum theory? What Is the Inside of the Earth Like? What exactly is happening beneath our feet, and can we learn enough to help predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? How Do We Learn Language? Is language acquisition an inborn biological ability, or does every child have to start from scratch? Is There a Missing Link? The story of human evolution is not complete. In addition to hoaxes such as "Piltdown Man" and extraordinary finds such as "Lucy," many puzzles remain. What, in the end, do we mean by a "missing link"?

We present an overview of the standard model of big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), which describes the production of the light elements in the early universe. The theoretical prediction for the abundances of D, 3 He, 4 He, and 7 Li is discussed. We emphasize the role of key nuclear reactions and the methods by which experimental cross section uncertainties are propagated into uncertainties in the predicted abundances. The observational determination of the light nuclides is also discussed. Particular attention is given to the comparison between the predicted and observed abundances, which yields a measurement of the cosmic baryon content. The spectrum of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now independently measures the baryon density to high precision; we show how the CMB data test BBN, and find that the CMB and the D and 4 He observations paint a consistent picture. This concordance stands as a major success of the hot big bang. On the other hand, 7 Li remains discrepant with the CMB-preferred baryon density; possible explanations are reviewed. Finally, moving beyond the standard model, primordial nucleosynthesis constraints on early universe and particle physics are also briefly discussed

Full Text Available El Chaco is one of the cantons has excelled in adventure tourism. However, since 2006 this activity has not broken and tourism has been separated from the local development. The objective of the present investigation is to find out the issues that affect the adventure tourism in El Chaco and to propose a new tourism product regarding the zone possibilities. In order to obtain the results, it has been developed a theoretical and methodological investigation focused in interviews and social cartography in Gonzalo Díaz de Pineda and in the cantonal head El Chaco. The main results denote the lack of organization, the high costs and the impacts generated by the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric power plant. These results make visible the problems and support the suggestion of practicing ecotourism as a new choice of local development in the region.

Full Text Available One of the most interesting aspects of J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories, especially The Lord of the Rings is the presentation of the multidimensional characters; therefore, the complexity of interpretations concerning their actions, motives, and aims will be manifested from the beginning of the story, until the end. Following the study of a mythic hero’s adventure, initiation, and psychological aspects, the present paper focuses on the investigation of Predestinate Call to Adventure. The researcher has benefited the theories of Joseph Campbell, presented in his renowned book The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the supplementary comments of Christopher Vogler. In fact, the researcher’s motivation for the work initiated in this regard is to improve the very few previous attempts studied by others, concerning Frodo Baggins’ role as the main and the most tragic hero of The Lord of the Rings.

We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze - a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational constant decreases with cosmic time, while the Newtonian attraction remains unchanged. The freeze and big bang pictures both describe the same observations or physical reality. We present a simple ;crossover model; without a big bang singularity. In the infinite past space-time is flat. Our model is compatible with present observations, describing the generation of primordial density fluctuations during inflation as well as the present transition to a dark energy-dominated universe.

The usual FRW hot big-bang cosmologies have been generalized by considering the equation of state ρ = Anm +(γ-1) -1 p, where m is the rest mass of the fluid particles and A is a dimensionless constant. Explicit analytic solutions are given for the flat case (ε=O). For large cosmological times these extended models behave as the standard Einstein-de Sitter universes regardless of the values of A and γ. Unlike the usual FRW flat case the deceleration parameter q is a time-dependent function and its present value, q≅ 1, obtained from the luminosity distance versus redshift relation, may be fitted by taking, for instance, A=1 and γ = 5/3 (monatomic relativistic gas with >> k B T). In all cases the universe cools obeying the same temperature law of the FRW models and it is shown that the age of the universe is only slightly modified. (author) [pt

Full Text Available In a popular class of models, dark matter comprises an asymmetric population of composite particles with short range interactions arising from a confined nonabelian gauge group. We show that coupling this sector to a well-motivated light mediator particle yields efficient darkleosynthesis, a dark-sector version of big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN, in generic regions of parameter space. Dark matter self-interaction bounds typically require the confinement scale to be above ΛQCD, which generically yields large (≫MeV/dark-nucleon binding energies. These bounds further suggest the mediator is relatively weakly coupled, so repulsive forces between dark-sector nuclei are much weaker than Coulomb repulsion between standard-model nuclei, which results in an exponential barrier-tunneling enhancement over standard BBN. Thus, darklei are easier to make and harder to break than visible species with comparable mass numbers. This process can efficiently yield a dominant population of states with masses significantly greater than the confinement scale and, in contrast to dark matter that is a fundamental particle, may allow the dominant form of dark matter to have high spin (S≫3/2, whose discovery would be smoking gun evidence for dark nuclei.

In a popular class of models, dark matter comprises an asymmetric population of composite particles with short range interactions arising from a confined nonabelian gauge group. We show that coupling this sector to a well-motivated light mediator particle yields efficient darkleosynthesis, a dark-sector version of big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), in generic regions of parameter space. Dark matter self-interaction bounds typically require the confinement scale to be above ΛQCD, which generically yields large (≫MeV /dark-nucleon) binding energies. These bounds further suggest the mediator is relatively weakly coupled, so repulsive forces between dark-sector nuclei are much weaker than Coulomb repulsion between standard-model nuclei, which results in an exponential barrier-tunneling enhancement over standard BBN. Thus, darklei are easier to make and harder to break than visible species with comparable mass numbers. This process can efficiently yield a dominant population of states with masses significantly greater than the confinement scale and, in contrast to dark matter that is a fundamental particle, may allow the dominant form of dark matter to have high spin (S ≫ 3 / 2), whose discovery would be smoking gun evidence for dark nuclei.

The purpose of this Bachelor’s thesis is to create an audio-visual documentation about an educational trip to Split, Croatia. The trip took place in April, 2014. The educational tour was organized by Laurea University of Applied Sciences. The destination, Split, were chosen by participants’ vote. The tour was arranged and planned by a group of students and the theme of the tour was Educational Tourism. The entire trip was taken into consideration from sustainable, Adventure and educational po...

The purpose of this thesis was to create new, more successful marketing strategy for case company Adventure Net through analyzing the current marketing strategy and market environment of the company. The tools included in the theoretical part were used to analyze the market environment and marketing strategy. The analyzing tools included were PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Ecologic, Legal) analysis, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats, Opportunities) analysis and com...

An introduction to the world of quarks and leptons, and of their interactions governed by fundamental symmetries of nature, as well as an introduction to the connection that exists between worlds of the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. The book starts with a simple presentation of the theoretical framework, the so-called Standard Model, which evolved gradually since the 1960's. This is followed by its main experimental successes, and its weaknesses and incompleteness. We proceed then with the incredible story of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — the largest purely scientific project ever realized. What follows is the discussion of the conception, design and construction of the detectors of size and complexity without precedent in scientific history. The book summarizes the main physics results obtained firstly during the initial phase of operation of the LHC, which culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 (the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013). This is followed by the results o...

Late in the winter of 2010, teachers across Massachusetts received invitations to apply for six- to eight-week Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) in which middle or high school teachers in STEM subjects would work alongside scientists and their graduate students as they sought to solve real-world problems. This country-wide effort was funded…

In a lively historical account the author tells of the extraordinary progress made in accelerator physics since World War II. He focuses mainly on the history of French accelerators which evolved from small electrostatic accelerators purchased abroad to complex and powerful storage rings and colliders built by French engineers and physicists. He shows how these machines served not only particle physicists, but also researchers working with synchrotron light. He recalls how these two scientific communities with such different backgrounds learned how to work together. The author was an accelerator physicist, and a project leader who played a key role in storage ring R and D, as well as in accelerator construction and operation. He describes the international context of the period, and relates the discussions on scientific policy issues of the time. He tells us about the technical challenges to be overcome and discusses the question of maintaining the balance between national development and international involvement. A number of important yet unknown features of this scientific adventure are related. This short history also includes his thoughts about the gestation of large scientific instruments which, no doubt, will interest researchers involved in 'big science'

Adventure Learning (AL), a hybrid distance education approach, provides students and teachers with the opportunity to learn about authentic curricular content areas while interacting with adventurers, students, and content experts at various locations throughout the world within an online learning environment (Doering, 2006). An AL curriculum and online environment provides collaborative community spaces where traditional hierarchical classroom roles are blurred and learning is transformed. AL has most recently become popular in K-12 classrooms nationally and internationally with millions of students participating online. However, in the literature, the term "adventure learning" many times gets confused with phrases such as "virtual fieldtrip" and activities where someone "exploring" is posting photos and text. This type of "adventure learning" is not "Adventure Learning" (AL), but merely a slideshow of their activities. The learning environment may not have any curricular and/or social goals, and if it does, the environment design many times does not support these objectives. AL, on the other hand, is designed so that both teachers and students understand that their online and curriculum activities are in synch and supportive of the curricular goals. In AL environments, there are no disparate activities as the design considers the educational, social, and technological affordances (Kirschner, Strijbos, Kreijns, & Beers, 2004); in other words, the artifacts of the learning environment encourage and support the instructional goals, social interactions, collaborative efforts, and ultimately learning. AL is grounded in two major theoretical approaches to learning - experiential and inquiry-based learning. As Kolb (1984) noted, in experiential learning, a learner creates meaning from direct experiences and reflections. Such is the goal of AL within the classroom. Additionally, AL affords learners a real-time authentic online learning experience concurrently as they

Much has been written on the benefits of big data for healthcare such as improving patient outcomes, public health surveillance, and healthcare policy decisions. Over the past five years, Big Data, and the data sciences field in general, has been hyped as the "Holy Grail" for the healthcare industry promising a more efficient healthcare system with the promise of improved healthcare outcomes. However, more recently, healthcare researchers are exposing the potential and harmful effects Big Data can have on patient care associating it with increased medical costs, patient mortality, and misguided decision making by clinicians and healthcare policy makers. In this paper, we review the current Big Data trends with a specific focus on the inadvertent negative impacts that Big Data could have on healthcare, in general, and specifically, as it relates to patient and clinical care. Our study results show that although Big Data is built up to be as a the "Holy Grail" for healthcare, small data techniques using traditional statistical methods are, in many cases, more accurate and can lead to more improved healthcare outcomes than Big Data methods. In sum, Big Data for healthcare may cause more problems for the healthcare industry than solutions, and in short, when it comes to the use of data in healthcare, "size isn't everything."

Vermont Center for Geographic Information — Point locations of big game reporting stations. Big game reporting stations are places where hunters can legally report harvested deer, bear, or turkey. These are...

Although Dr. Milan Hauner's study 'Stalin's Big Fleet program' has focused primarily on the formation of Big Fleets during the Tsarist and Soviet periods of Russia's naval history, there are important lessons...

What is the meaning associated with participation in an outdoor adventure for a person with a disability? A number of studies have investigated the topic of adventure program outcomes for people with and without disabilities. The author located two studies about kayaking with individuals with disabilities: 1) Siegel Taylor and Evans McGruder (1995) found âsubjects...

Adventure counseling has been thought of as a highly specialized application of group counseling skills in a wilderness environment. In fact, adventure counseling is based on a developmental theory of group, can be useful for a variety of clients, and can be thoughtfully integrated into clinical and hospital settings. This article describes the…

This study examines components of outdoor adventure programs for middle school students, using a school with a successful program as a model. Outdoor education is often left out of these years for financial and safety reasons, however the benefits of adventure programs are both measurable and profound to self-concept, confidence, identity growth,…

This study examines the effects of outdoor developmental adventure programming (ODA) on college students' self-esteem. Although some previous studies have shown that outdoor adventure programming has positive effects on self-esteem, others did not find any effect. A quasi-experimental study was conducted over 5 months, which included two pretests…

Adventure has outgrown its use as a metaphor and motive for educational journeys into the cultural outdoors. Self-reliance cannot counter the mechanisation of everyday life. "Adventure" is produced and serviced by the very people who felt its worth to their own individualisation and now advance its professionalisation for their own…

Indigenous voices are largely silent in the outdoor education and adventure therapy literature. The purpose of this research collaboration was to understand how a 10-day outdoor adventure leadership experience (OALE) may promote resilience and well-being for Indigenous youth through their participation in the program. The process was examined…

Big data management is a reality for an increasing number of organizations in many areas and represents a set of challenges involving big data modeling, storage and retrieval, analysis and visualization. However, technological resources, people and processes are crucial to facilitate the management of big data in any kind of organization, allowing information and knowledge from a large volume of data to support decision-making. Big data management can be supported by these three dimensions: t...

At its latest venue at Fermilab from 10-14 November, the American Physical Society's Division of Particles and Fields meeting entered a new dimension. These regular meetings, which allow younger researchers to communicate with their peers, have been gaining popularity over the years (this was the seventh in the series), but nobody had expected almost a thousand participants and nearly 500 requests to give talks. Thus Fermilab's 800-seat auditorium had to be supplemented with another room with a video hookup, while the parallel sessions were organized into nine bewildering streams covering fourteen major physics topics. With the conventionality of the Standard Model virtually unchallenged, physics does not move fast these days. While most of the physics results had already been covered in principle at the International Conference on High Energy Physics held in Dallas in August (October, page 1), the Fermilab DPF meeting had a very different atmosphere. Major international meetings like Dallas attract big names from far and wide, and it is difficult in such an august atmosphere for young researchers to find a receptive audience. This was not the case at the DPF parallel sessions. The meeting also adopted a novel approach, with the parallels sandwiched between an initial day of plenaries to set the scene, and a final day of summaries. With the whole world waiting for the sixth ('top') quark to be discovered at Fermilab's Tevatron protonantiproton collider, the meeting began with updates from Avi Yagil and Ronald Madaras from the big detectors, CDF and DO respectively. Although rumours flew thick and fast, the Tevatron has not yet reached the top, although Yagil could show one intriguing event of a type expected from the heaviest quark

At its latest venue at Fermilab from 10-14 November, the American Physical Society's Division of Particles and Fields meeting entered a new dimension. These regular meetings, which allow younger researchers to communicate with their peers, have been gaining popularity over the years (this was the seventh in the series), but nobody had expected almost a thousand participants and nearly 500 requests to give talks. Thus Fermilab's 800-seat auditorium had to be supplemented with another room with a video hookup, while the parallel sessions were organized into nine bewildering streams covering fourteen major physics topics. With the conventionality of the Standard Model virtually unchallenged, physics does not move fast these days. While most of the physics results had already been covered in principle at the International Conference on High Energy Physics held in Dallas in August (October, page 1), the Fermilab DPF meeting had a very different atmosphere. Major international meetings like Dallas attract big names from far and wide, and it is difficult in such an august atmosphere for young researchers to find a receptive audience. This was not the case at the DPF parallel sessions. The meeting also adopted a novel approach, with the parallels sandwiched between an initial day of plenaries to set the scene, and a final day of summaries. With the whole world waiting for the sixth ('top') quark to be discovered at Fermilab's Tevatron protonantiproton collider, the meeting began with updates from Avi Yagil and Ronald Madaras from the big detectors, CDF and DO respectively. Although rumours flew thick and fast, the Tevatron has not yet reached the top, although Yagil could show one intriguing event of a type expected from the heaviest quark.

Due to market forces and technological evolution, Big Data computing is developing at an increasing rate. A wide variety of novel approaches and tools have emerged to tackle the challenges of Big Data, creating both more opportunities and more challenges for students and professionals in the field of data computation and analysis. Presenting a mix of industry cases and theory, Big Data Computing discusses the technical and practical issues related to Big Data in intelligent information management. Emphasizing the adoption and diffusion of Big Data tools and technologies in industry, the book i

Tap the power of Big Data with Microsoft technologies Big Data is here, and Microsoft's new Big Data platform is a valuable tool to help your company get the very most out of it. This timely book shows you how to use HDInsight along with HortonWorks Data Platform for Windows to store, manage, analyze, and share Big Data throughout the enterprise. Focusing primarily on Microsoft and HortonWorks technologies but also covering open source tools, Microsoft Big Data Solutions explains best practices, covers on-premises and cloud-based solutions, and features valuable case studies. Best of all,

Full Text Available Big data management is a reality for an increasing number of organizations in many areas and represents a set of challenges involving big data modeling, storage and retrieval, analysis and visualization. However, technological resources, people and processes are crucial to facilitate the management of big data in any kind of organization, allowing information and knowledge from a large volume of data to support decision-making. Big data management can be supported by these three dimensions: technology, people and processes. Hence, this article discusses these dimensions: the technological dimension that is related to storage, analytics and visualization of big data; the human aspects of big data; and, in addition, the process management dimension that involves in a technological and business approach the aspects of big data management.

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes, although primarily famous as stories of detection of crime, offer a considerable amount to interest the medical reader. There are many medical references in the stories, and the influence of Conan Doyle's medical background is clearly seen in the main characters. Aspects of the stories also reflect Conan Doyle's medical career, and also something of his attitude towards the profession. From Holmes's sayings and accounts of his methods, parallels can be drawn between Holmesian deduction and the diagnostic process. It is concluded, however, that deduction cannot be used as a direct paradigm since medical problems are rarely soluble through a process of logic alone.

"Scientists at the proton-proton Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator and collider will postpone a test that could help solve the mystery of what happened a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang." (1 page)

"A premier nuclear physics institute here has come up with India's first indigenously designed microchip that will facilitate research on the Big Bang theory in Geneva's CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory." (1 page)

Achievements and capabilities influence the self-esteem of skilled adventure athletes. Self-esteem affects individual mental health. Aging commonly reduces adventure capabilities. To avoid loss in self-esteem, aging adventure athletes are forced to adjust their aspirations. Here, I examine this process using participant observation, ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches. The qualitative data for this analysis are derived from 60 years' experience in outdoor adventure activities, and ∼30,000 person-hours of participant observation. I argue that individuals assess their own capabilities against a set of specific feats. For some activities, successful completion of a specific feat is known as nailing it. The selection of these feats depends on factors such as activity and geographic location, as well as individual experience and peer comparisons. I examine the detailed process using a single feat repeated over a period of decades, the bubble-line kayak run through Lava Falls on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. I compare other examples of nail or fail to construct a general framework for self-esteem in aging adventure athletes, with both physical and psychological feedback loops. I also identify two key thresholds, as aging adventure athletes recognize their declining skills. These may apply to aging more broadly, beyond outdoor adventure.

Full Text Available Achievements and capabilities influence the self-esteem of skilled adventure athletes. Self-esteem affects individual mental health. Aging commonly reduces adventure capabilities. To avoid loss in self-esteem, aging adventure athletes are forced to adjust their aspirations. Here, I examine this process using participant observation, ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches. The qualitative data for this analysis are derived from 60 years’ experience in outdoor adventure activities, and ∼30,000 person-hours of participant observation. I argue that individuals assess their own capabilities against a set of specific feats. For some activities, successful completion of a specific feat is known as nailing it. The selection of these feats depends on factors such as activity and geographic location, as well as individual experience and peer comparisons. I examine the detailed process using a single feat repeated over a period of decades, the bubble-line kayak run through Lava Falls on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. I compare other examples of nail or fail to construct a general framework for self-esteem in aging adventure athletes, with both physical and psychological feedback loops. I also identify two key thresholds, as aging adventure athletes recognize their declining skills. These may apply to aging more broadly, beyond outdoor adventure.

We give a mathematically exact and physically faithful embedding of curved 4D cosmology in a flat 5D space, thereby enabling visualization of the big bang in a new and informative way. In fact, in unified theories of fields and particles with real extra dimensions, it is possible to dispense with the initial singularity.

Full Text Available Big Data can revolutionize humanity. Hidden within the huge amounts and variety of the data we are creating we may find information, facts, social insights and benchmarks that were once virtually impossible to find or were simply inexistent. Large volumes of data allow organizations to tap in real time the full potential of all the internal or external information they possess. Big data calls for quick decisions and innovative ways to assist customers and the society as a whole. Big data platforms and product portfolio will help customers harness to the full the value of big data volumes. This paper deals with technical and technological issues related to handling big data volumes in the Big Data environment.

This work offers a summary of Cukier the book: "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How we Live, Work, and Think" by Viktor Mayer-Schonberg and Kenneth. Summary of the ideas in Viktor Mayer-Schonberg's and Kenneth Cukier's book: " Big Data " explains that big data is where we use huge quantities of data to make better predictions based on the fact we identify patters in the data rather than trying to understand the underlying causes in more detail. This summary highlights that big data will be a source of new economic value and innovation in the future. Moreover, it shows that it will

Big data is a big topic in all leadership circles. Leaders in professional development must develop an understanding of what data are available across the organization that can inform effective planning for forecasting. Collaborating with others to integrate data sets can increase the power of prediction. Big data alone is insufficient to make big decisions. Leaders must find ways to access small data and triangulate multiple types of data to ensure the best decision making. J Contin Educ Nurs. 2017;48(2):60-61. Copyright 2017, SLACK Incorporated.

and beautiful visualisations. However, we also need to ask what the tools of big data can do both for the Humanities and for more interpretative approaches and methods. Thus, we prefer to explore how the power of computation, new sensor technologies and massive storage can also help with video-based qualitative......For the last few years, we have witnessed a hype about the potential results and insights that quantitative big data can bring to the social sciences. The wonder of big data has moved into education, traffic planning, and disease control with a promise of making things better with big numbers...

The directors of major physics labs worldwide met in Snowmass, CO, to make plans for a new powerful accelerator. It will be so expensive they agree it could only be built with international collaboration on a previously unknown scale. However they also have to agree on the type of accelerator and where it will be built as well as who will pay for it (2 1/2 pages).

GoNorth! is an adventure learning series developed at the University of Minnesota in collaboration with NOMADS Online Expeditions. GoNorth! uses real-time experiences of dogsled expeditions on a multimedia saturated website at http://www.PolarHusky.com to motivate and engage millions of K-12 students and teachers. The program is free and research (Doering & Veletsianos, 2007) shows that it can be adopted by any teacher who signs up to use the program. It is currently utilized in 3400+ classrooms across the 50 US States and in 29 countries worldwide. Research (Doering & Veletsianos, 2007; 2008) notes that students working with GoNorth! are excited, motivated, and eager to engage with authentic tasks, solve real-world problems, collaborate with colleagues and experts, and initiate actions in their own community. Our team of educators, scientists and explorers circumnavigate the Arctic traveling by dog team to a new Arctic locale every year. Driven by an environmental question of particular relevance to the given Arctic region, each year a comprehensive natural and social science GoNorth! Curriculum & Activity Guide (450+ pages) is developed reflecting the expedition's current Arctic locale and its indigenous culture. The associated online learning environment delivers comprehensive resources about the region of travel, collaborative opportunities, live field updates and field research findings synched real-time to the curriculum. Field research relevant to understanding patterns of climate change and polar science is conducted with independent researchers featured as "Cool GoNorth! Scientists." Collaborations span from scientists at NASA and the United States Department of Agriculture to student observers in pan-Arctic communities as part of the NSF-supported initiative "What Is Climate Change to You?." This scientific research and fieldwork in turn coincides with the curriculum. The result is a community of learners on the Internet gaining knowledge from Arctic

This study aims to make multimedia adventure games and find out the improvement of learners’ understanding after being given treatment of using multimedia adventure game in learning Web Programming. Participants of this study are students of class X (ten) in one of the Vocational Schools (SMK) in Indonesia. The material of web programming is a material that difficult enough to be understood by the participant therefore needed tools to facilitate the participants to understand the material. Solutions offered in this study is by using multimedia adventures game. Multimedia has been created using Construct2 and measured understood with method Non-equivalent Control Group Design. Pre-test and post-test has given to learners who received treatment using the multimedia adventure showed increase in understanding web programming material.

Starting from the Janus solution and its gauge theory dual, we obtain the dual gauge theory description of the cosmological solution by the procedure of double analytic continuation. The coupling is driven either to zero or to infinity at the big-bang and big-crunch singularities, which are shown to be related by the S-duality symmetry. In the dual Yang-Mills theory description, these are nonsingular as the coupling goes to zero in the N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. The cosmological singularities simply signal the failure of the supergravity description of the full type IIB superstring theory

Big Data are of increasing importance in a variety of areas, especially in the biosciences. There is an emerging critical need for Big Data tools and methods, because of the potential impact of advancements in these areas. Importantly, statisticians and statistical thinking have a major role to play in creating meaningful progress in this arena. We would like to emphasize this point in this special issue, as it highlights both the dramatic need for statistical input for Big Data analysis and for a greater number of statisticians working on Big Data problems. We use the field of statistical neuroimaging to demonstrate these points. As such, this paper covers several applications and novel methodological developments of Big Data tools applied to neuroimaging data.

This paper provides an overview of recent developments in big data in the context of biomedical and health informatics. It outlines the key characteristics of big data and how medical and health informatics, translational bioinformatics, sensor informatics, and imaging informatics will benefit from an integrated approach of piecing together different aspects of personalized information from a diverse range of data sources, both structured and unstructured, covering genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, as well as imaging, clinical diagnosis, and long-term continuous physiological sensing of an individual. It is expected that recent advances in big data will expand our knowledge for testing new hypotheses about disease management from diagnosis to prevention to personalized treatment. The rise of big data, however, also raises challenges in terms of privacy, security, data ownership, data stewardship, and governance. This paper discusses some of the existing activities and future opportunities related to big data for health, outlining some of the key underlying issues that need to be tackled.

The French mining adventure still arouses enthusiasm. The search for uranium began in 1945 with the creation of the Cea (Atomic Energy Board) whose one mission was to supply the nascent French nuclear programme with the necessary materials. Prospecting works were then led throughout France, Madagascar, the Ivory Coast and the French equatorial Africa. More than 60 years later the only surviving actor of this quest for uranium has become the mining department of Areva Nuclear Cycle which is itself a sub-company of Areva. The author, who was an ancient high executive of Cogema draws a detailed history of the French uranium mining industry with with its ups and downs, by analysing the impact of the 2 oil crisis and of the decline of nuclear energy in the decade following the Chernobyl accident. (A.C.)

It is dawn, -17°C, and 4700 meters above sea level, and two young scientists are alone in a tiny tent in the middle of the immense desert of the Bolivian Altiplano. Their bicycles and sleeping bags are coated with a thin layer of ice. Muscles aching, as they did yesterday and probably will tomorrow, they shrug off their sleepiness as the sunrise heats up their tent. After a simple breakfast, the researchers peek out and feast their eyes on a stunning view of high volcanic peaks and salt lakes. They are on the Andean Geotrail, a 9-month bike adventure through the Andes mountains, from Ushuaia in Argentinean Tierra del Fuego to Nazca, Peru (see Figure 1). Their goal is to share this spectacular geological setting with primary-, secondary- and high-school students.

in the context of dynamic and non-dynamic music. 60 subjects answered self-report questionnaires each time after playing a 3rd-person action-adventure in one of three conditions accounting for (1) dynamic music, (2) non-dynamic music/low arousal potential and (3) non-dynamic music/high arousal potential......Aiming to immerse players into a new realm of drama experience, a growing number of video games utilize interactive, ‘dynamic’ music that reacts adaptively to game events. Though little is known about the involved perceptual processes, the design rationale of enhanced immersive experiences is taken...... over by public discussion including scientific accounts, despite lacking empirical validation. The present paper intends to fill this gap by hypothesizing facilitatory effects of dynamic music on attention allocation in the matching of expected and incoming expressive characteristics of concurrent...

Part mad manifesto, part revolutionary love letter, part freight train adventure story  Maps to the Other Side is a self-reflective shattered mirror, a twist on the classic punk rock travel narrative that searches for authenticity and connection in the lives of strangers and the solidarity and limitations of underground community. Beginning at the edge of the internet age, a time when radical zine culture prefigured social networking sites, these timely writings paint an illuminated trail through a complex labyrinth of undocumented migrants, anarchist community organizers, brilliant visionary artists, revolutionary seed savers, punk rock historians, social justice farmers, radical mental health activists, and iconoclastic bridge builders. This book is a document of one person's odyssey to transform his experiences navigating the psychiatric system by building community in the face of adversity; a set of maps for how rebels and dreamers can survive and thrive in a crazy world.

Full Text Available In South Africa and across the globe, the development of adventure tourism industry has resulted in a multitude of different types of activities, destinations, risks, impacts and unsustainable practices. The development of adventure tourism in many destinations has boosted many economies across rural communities and countries. The added benefits of developing adventure tourism in a sustainable manner include the promotion of responsible investment, infrastructure development and a host of other positive economic, social and environmental impacts. This study investigates the stakeholders will to utilise sustainable adventure tourism indicators from residents, tourists, business owners and government employees at Waterval Boven if made available. Descriptive statistics were presented; Cronbach Alpha and Chi-square tests were also applied. In general, the respondents perceived the indicators positively and felt they could assist in the sustainable development of adventure tourism. The study contributes towards the development of sustainable adventure tourism destinations that can make a significant contribution towards poverty alleviation by maximising social and economic benefits for locals, enhancing cultural heritage and reducing any negative impacts on the environment.

Full Text Available This paper examines research on adventurous physical activities in nature from the perspective of the sentient body. Drawing upon ethnographic and autoethnographic research, I examine what has been termed 'peak' happenings or 'flow' which many who practise adventurous activities claim to experience through their whole body when in the 'zone'. I consider the concept of 'edgework', voluntary risk-taking, and insightful mobile and social understanding of the relationships between body, emotions and the elements, where the adventurous activity is experienced and interpreted as oneness with nature or expressed as 'spiritual' not only in high but also low risk nature-based sport. I then consider if and in what ways these knowledges may bring about greater understanding and action in relation to social and environmental justice. I argue that adventurous activities/nature-based sport may provide processes and practices that are alternative or complementary to traditional sporting 'body techniques' or 'body pedagogics'. I suggest that modern embodied adventurous practices in nature challenge dominant narratives of body/mind separation and potentially provide a pedagogic process fostering kinetic empathy. Finally I draw attention to the paradox of (re-presenting sensorial experiences of sport in nature and ask for consideration on how we interconnect with the environment when we participate in adventureous nature-based sports.

Idea in Brief: Problem: There is an enormous profit potential for manufacturing firms in big data, but one of the key barriers to obtaining data-driven growth is the lack of knowledge about which capabilities are needed to extract value and profit from data. Solution: We (BDBB research group at C...

The idea that the purely phenomenological knowledge that we can extract by analyzing large amounts of data can be useful in healthcare seems to contradict the desire of VPH researchers to build detailed mechanistic models for individual patients. But in practice no model is ever entirely phenomenological or entirely mechanistic. We propose in this position paper that big data analytics can be successfully combined with VPH technologies to produce robust and effective in silico medicine solutions. In order to do this, big data technologies must be further developed to cope with some specific requirements that emerge from this application. Such requirements are: working with sensitive data; analytics of complex and heterogeneous data spaces, including nontextual information; distributed data management under security and performance constraints; specialized analytics to integrate bioinformatics and systems biology information with clinical observations at tissue, organ and organisms scales; and specialized analytics to define the "physiological envelope" during the daily life of each patient. These domain-specific requirements suggest a need for targeted funding, in which big data technologies for in silico medicine becomes the research priority.

We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze — a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational constant decreases with cosmic time, while the Newtonian attraction remains unchanged. The freeze and big bang pictures both describe the same observations or physical reality. We present a simple “crossover model” without a big bang singularity. In the infinite past space–time is flat. Our model is compatible with present observations, describing the generation of primordial density fluctuations during inflation as well as the present transition to a dark energy-dominated universe.

We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze — a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational constant decreases with cosmic time, while the Newtonian attraction remains unchanged. The freeze and big bang pictures both describe the same observations or physical reality. We present a simple “crossover model” without a big bang singularity. In the infinite past space–time is flat. Our model is compatible with present observations, describing the generation of primordial density fluctuations during inflation as well as the present transition to a dark energy-dominated universe

Full Text Available We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze — a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational constant decreases with cosmic time, while the Newtonian attraction remains unchanged. The freeze and big bang pictures both describe the same observations or physical reality. We present a simple “crossover model” without a big bang singularity. In the infinite past space–time is flat. Our model is compatible with present observations, describing the generation of primordial density fluctuations during inflation as well as the present transition to a dark energy-dominated universe.

The amount of data at the global level has grown exponentially. Along with this phenomena, we have a need for a new unit of measure like exabyte, zettabyte, and yottabyte as the last unit measures the amount of data. The growth of data gives a situation where the classic systems for the collection, storage, processing, and visualization of data losing the battle with a large amount, speed, and variety of data that is generated continuously. Many of data that is created by the Internet of Things, IoT (cameras, satellites, cars, GPS navigation, etc.). It is our challenge to come up with new technologies and tools for the management and exploitation of these large amounts of data. Big Data is a hot topic in recent years in IT circles. However, Big Data is recognized in the business world, and increasingly in the public administration. This paper proposes an ontology of big data analytics and examines how to enhance business intelligence through big data analytics as a service by presenting a big data analytics services-oriented architecture. This paper also discusses the interrelationship between business intelligence and big data analytics. The proposed approach in this paper might facilitate the research and development of business analytics, big data analytics, and business intelligence as well as intelligent agents.

This book is a collection of chapters written by experts on various aspects of big data. The book aims to explain what big data is and how it is stored and used. The book starts from the fundamentals and builds up from there. It is intended to serve as a review of the state-of-the-practice in the field of big data handling. The traditional framework of relational databases can no longer provide appropriate solutions for handling big data and making it available and useful to users scattered around the globe. The study of big data covers a wide range of issues including management of heterogeneous data, big data frameworks, change management, finding patterns in data usage and evolution, data as a service, service-generated data, service management, privacy and security. All of these aspects are touched upon in this book. It also discusses big data applications in different domains. The book will prove useful to students, researchers, and practicing database and networking engineers.

In recent years, big data has been one of the most controversially discussed technologies in terms of its possible positive and negative impact. Therefore, the need for technology assessments is obvious. This paper first provides, based on the results of a technology assessment study, an overview...... of the potential and challenges associated with big data and then describes the problems experienced during the study as well as methods found helpful to address them. The paper concludes with reflections on how the insights from the technology assessment study may have an impact on the future governance of big...... data....

The precision of measurements in modern cosmology has made huge strides in recent years, with measurements of the cosmic microwave background and the determination of the Hubble constant now rivaling the level of precision of the predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis. However, these results are not necessarily consistent with the predictions of the Standard Model of big bang nucleosynthesis. Reconciling these discrepancies may require extensions of the basic tenets of the model, and possibly of the reaction rates that determine the big bang abundances

Find the right big data solution for your business or organization Big data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weather patterns monitored by meteorologists, or social network activity can quickly outpace the capacity of traditional data management tools. If you need to develop or manage big data solutions, you'll appreciate how these four experts define, explain, and guide you through this new and often confusing concept. You'll learn what it is, why it m

Full Text Available Big data is and will be used more in the future as a tool for everything that happens both online and offline. Of course , online is a real hobbit, Big Data is found in this medium , offering many advantages , being a real help for all consumers. In this paper we talked about Big Data as being a plus in developing new applications, by gathering useful information about the users and their behaviour.We've also presented the key aspects of real-time monitoring and the architecture principles of this technology. The most important benefit brought to this paper is presented in the cloud section.

Technology assessment of big data, in particular cloud based big data services, for the Office for Technology Assessment at the German federal parliament (Bundestag)......Technology assessment of big data, in particular cloud based big data services, for the Office for Technology Assessment at the German federal parliament (Bundestag)...

TNO, in collaboration with the Big Data Value Center, presents the fourth Small Big Data Congress! Our congress aims at providing an overview of practical and innovative applications based on big data. Do you want to know what is happening in applied research with big data? And what can already be

This ebook aims to give practical guidance for all those who want to understand big data better and learn how to make the most of it. Topics range from big data analysis, mobile big data and managing unstructured data to technologies, governance and intellectual property and security issues surrounding big data.

This paper conceptualizes how large-scale data and algorithms condition and reshape knowledge production when addressing international development challenges. The concept of governmentality and four dimensions of an analytics of government are proposed as a theoretical framework to examine how big...... data is constituted as an aspiration to improve the data and knowledge underpinning development efforts. Based on this framework, we argue that big data’s impact on how relevant problems are governed is enabled by (1) new techniques of visualizing development issues, (2) linking aspects...... shows that big data problematizes selected aspects of traditional ways to collect and analyze data for development (e.g. via household surveys). We also demonstrate that using big data analyses to address development challenges raises a number of questions that can deteriorate its impact....

We elaborate on key issues of our paper New games, new rules: big data and the changing context of strategy as a means of addressing some of the concerns raised by the paper’s commentators. We initially deal with the issue of social data and the role it plays in the current data revolution...... and the technological recording of facts. We further discuss the significance of the very mechanisms by which big data is produced as distinct from the very attributes of big data, often discussed in the literature. In the final section of the paper, we qualify the alleged importance of algorithms and claim...... that the structures of data capture and the architectures in which data generation is embedded are fundamental to the phenomenon of big data....

The big bang theory is a model of the universe which makes the striking prediction that the universe began a finite amount of time in the past at the so called "Big Bang singularity." We explore the physical and mathematical justification of this surprising result. After laying down the framework of the universe as a spacetime manifold, we combine physical observations with global symmetrical assumptions to deduce the FRW cosmological models which predict a big bang singularity. Next we prove a couple theorems due to Stephen Hawking which show that the big bang singularity exists even if one removes the global symmetrical assumptions. Lastly, we investigate the conditions one needs to impose on a spacetime if one wishes to avoid a singularity. The ideas and concepts used here to study spacetimes are similar to those used to study Riemannian manifolds, therefore we compare and contrast the two geometries throughout.

of the underlying distributed platform. BigDansing takes these rules into a series of transformations that enable distributed computations and several optimizations, such as shared scans and specialized joins operators. Experimental results on both synthetic

Full Text Available Today Big data is an emerging topic, as the quantity of the information grows exponentially, laying the foundation for its main challenge, the value of the information. The information value is not only defined by the value extraction from huge data sets, as fast and optimal as possible, but also by the value extraction from uncertain and inaccurate data, in an innovative manner using Big data analytics. At this point, the main challenge of the businesses that use Big data tools is to clearly define the scope and the necessary output of the business so that the real value can be gained. This article aims to explain the Big data concept, its various classifications criteria, architecture, as well as the impact in the world wide processes.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce — The BCPITTAGS database is used to store data from an Oncorhynchus mykiss (steelhead/rainbow trout) population dynamics study in Big Creek, a coastal stream along the...

on top of general-purpose distributed platforms. Its programming inter- face allows users to express data quality rules independently from the requirements of parallel and distributed environments. Without sacrificing their quality, BigDans- ing also

Recent developments in the techniques and technologies of collecting, sharing and analysing data are challenging the field of information systems (IS) research let alone the boundaries of organizations and the established practices of decision-making. Coined ‘open data’ and ‘big data......’, these developments introduce an unprecedented level of societal and organizational engagement with the potential of computational data to generate new insights and information. Based on the commonalities shared by open data and big data, we develop a research framework that we refer to as open big data (OBD......) by employing the dimensions of ‘order’ and ‘relationality’. We argue that these dimensions offer a viable approach for IS research on open and big data because they address one of the core value propositions of IS; i.e. how to support organizing with computational data. We contrast these dimensions with two...

In these lectures I briefly review Big Bang baryosynthesis. In the first lecture I discuss the evidence which exists for the BAU, the failure of non-GUT symmetrical cosmologies, the qualitative picture of baryosynthesis, and numerical results of detailed baryosynthesis calculations. In the second lecture I discuss the requisite CP violation in some detail, further the statistical mechanics of baryosynthesis, possible complications to the simplest scenario, and one cosmological implication of Big Bang baryosynthesis. (orig./HSI)

Full Text Available This paper objective is to assess, in light of the main works of Minsky, his view and analysis of what he called the "Big Government" as that huge institution which, in parallels with the "Big Bank" was capable of ensuring stability in the capitalist system and regulate its inherently unstable financial system in mid-20th century. In this work, we analyze how Minsky proposes an active role for the government in a complex economic system flawed by financial instability.

"The most extensive and expensive scientific instrument in history is due to start working this summer at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Two beams of protons will accelerate in opposite directions around a 27 km tunnel under the alpine foothills until they are travelling almost at the speed of light - and then smash together, reproducing on a tiny scale the intense energy of the new-born universe after the inaugural Big Bang 15bn years ago. (1 page)

The most extensive and expensive scientific instrument in history is due to start working this summer at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Two beams of protons will accelerate in opposite directions around a 27km tunnel under the Alpine foothills until they are travelling almost at the speed of light - and then smash together, reproducing on a tiny scale the intense energy of the new-born universe after the inaugural Big Bang 15bn years ago.

Full Text Available Adventure tourism represents traveling motivated by the wish to be in the nature. It includes both physical and cultural interaction between the nature and a tourist. The concept of “adventure” includes the wish of a guest for unusual activities and experience. This is also followed by excitement. The natural and tourist potentials of Serbia are analyzed in this work. The types of adventure tourism, for which there are favorable conditions in our country, are sorted out. Among different adventure activities the most important are: hiking, speleo tourism, rafting, cannoning, paragliding and mountain biking. Nevertheless, due to many problems this branch of tourism is undeveloped. In the analysis of the tourist space of Serbia, the beginning point is the mountain documents from the section about the development of tourism. In accordance with them and based on natural and anthropogenic resources and the potentials of Serbia, the possible ways of development of adventure tourism in Serbia are defined. The aim of this work is to draw attention to adventure tourism of Serbia and to point out the possibilities of its development based on the characteristics of the natural values. It also aims to suggest the potential areas-centers of development of this tourist branch.

Within the realm of education, seldom does an innovative program become available with the potential to change an educator`s teaching methodology. Adventures in Supercomputing (AiS), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is such a program. It is a program for high school teachers that changes the teacher paradigm from a teacher-directed approach of teaching to a student-centered approach. {open_quotes}A student-centered classroom offers better opportunities for development of internal motivation, planning skills, goal setting and perseverance than does the traditional teacher-directed mode{close_quotes}. Not only is the process of teaching changed, but the cross-curricula integration within the AiS materials is remarkable. Written from a teacher`s perspective, this paper will describe the AiS program and its effects on teachers and students, primarily at Wartburg Central High School, in Wartburg, Tennessee. The AiS program in Tennessee is sponsored by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The nuclear energy history is one of the most exciting scientifical and industrial adventure. In France, in a few decades, nuclear energy has become the main energy source for power generation. The aim of this book is to present the stakes of this challenge, to better outline the difficulties that have been encountered all along its development in order to better understand the complexness of such a development. After an overview of the successive advances of atomic and nuclear physics since more than a century, the book describes the genesis of nuclear energy, its industrial developments and its still wide open perspectives. The conclusions makes a status of the advantages and risks linked with this energy source. The book contains also the testimonies of two French nuclear actors: P. Benoist and S. David. The forewords by H. Langevin, daughter of F. and I. Joliot-Curie, stresses on the past and future role of nuclear energy in the live synergy between research and industry. (J.S.)

Full Text Available Focussing on the northern travelogues of two women travellers from the late nineteenth century, Ethel Brilliana Tweedie’s A Winter Jaunt to Norway: with Accounts of Nansen, Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, and Many Others and Polar Gleams; an Account of a Voyage on the Yacht ‘Blencathra’ by Helen Peel, this article suggests that rather than presenting a polarized gendered perspective of Arctic travel, in their writing Peel and Tweedie negotiate between masculine and feminine-coded associations in order to legitimate and popularize their travels, whilst remaining within the conventions of Victorian femininity. Of the strategies for ensuring the apparent propriety of their text, the references to clothing are highly significant on several levels. Not only could Peel and Tweedie show their adherence (or not to conventional feminine dress through their descriptions of their clothing, they could also illustrate their relationship to other travellers and the Norwegians they encountered. Thus the ‘petticoat encumbrances’ have a double function in the text. Symbolic of Victorian conventions of femininity and their limitations on women, the adherence to sartorial norms at least indicated to readers and critics of the woman traveller’s compliance with gender conventions. This achieved, the woman travel writer had more scope to embark on her remarkable journey and to write about its potential adventures with enthusiasm as a ‘female adventurer’ and still remain within the acceptable boundaries of late-Victorian femininity.

The famous Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz suffered a stroke at 65 years, which he called 'the adventure' or 'the accident'. He developed language disturbances suggesting crossed aphasia in a right hander with left hemiparesis. This uncommon pattern allowed him to continue to write his diary and to report his disturbances, with a unique depth and precision, especially for cognitive-emotional changes. Language and motor dysfunction recovered within a few weeks, but Ramuz complained of persisting emotional flattening alternating with irritability, fatigue, depression, anxiety, and concentration difficulty, which gave him the feeling to have become another person and to be inhabited by a stranger, whom he compared with devils. Ramuz fought several months to resume his literary activity, having the impression to have lost inspiration and creativity. However, the novels he wrote less than 6 months after stroke show no stylistic changes and have been found to be of the same quality as his previous production. Ramuz even 'used' his stroke experience in his work, in particular in a novel depicting an old man who has a stroke and dies of it. Ramuz's diary, with his own daily description of stroke features and consequences during acute and recovery phases, is a unique document in a writer of his importance, and provides invaluable information on subjective emotional and cognitive experience of stroke. Copyright (c) 2010 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Illustrations are a good way to visualize what is not readily seen. To take this medium a step further, we use illustrations in the form of comics as a way to teach Earth science concepts. The comic book format lends itself to engaging reading for young and old alike and has been used recently by the American Physical Society (APS) and by NASA as an outreach teaching tool. Due to their sequential nature, comic books make it easy for readers to follow a story and grasp concepts that are covered. The limited text in each panel can also help those where reading is a challenge or for those who become nervous and/or discouraged with long text passages. The illustrations also add visual clues that can aid in understanding the concepts being laid out. In the second installment of "Adventures of Geo," we use the comic book format to introduce the Moon, its formation, evolution, orbit and its interplay with Earth. The exploration of such faraway places is readily disseminated to the public through such a graphical approach. The comic books are aimed at middle school students in the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) where Earth Science topics are covered in the curriculum.

Data cleansing approaches have usually focused on detecting and fixing errors with little attention to scaling to big datasets. This presents a serious impediment since data cleansing often involves costly computations such as enumerating pairs of tuples, handling inequality joins, and dealing with user-defined functions. In this paper, we present BigDansing, a Big Data Cleansing system to tackle efficiency, scalability, and ease-of-use issues in data cleansing. The system can run on top of most common general purpose data processing platforms, ranging from DBMSs to MapReduce-like frameworks. A user-friendly programming interface allows users to express data quality rules both declaratively and procedurally, with no requirement of being aware of the underlying distributed platform. BigDansing takes these rules into a series of transformations that enable distributed computations and several optimizations, such as shared scans and specialized joins operators. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets show that BigDansing outperforms existing baseline systems up to more than two orders of magnitude without sacrificing the quality provided by the repair algorithms.

Full Text Available Nowadays, the young people are not interested in the local culture as a “wayang” puppet. This condition threatens the extinction of some of the local culture that should be a mainstay of the industry entering an era of creative industries. On the other hand, theyare more interested in playing computer games as changing of people's lifestyles. It becomes our basic idea to produce a game as a creative product. The genre of this game is fighting-adventure. This game depictures a story of fighting between the baby Tetuko and giant Kala Pracona. The game uses Kinect and 3D platform technology to attract more players to feel their adventures. With Kinect technology, the player can control the character with his gesture. Thus, this game will increase the awareness of young people about the culture of Wayang. Keywords : 3D game, kinect,adventure, local culture, creative industry.

This study examined the integration of professional judgement and decision-making processes in adventure sports coaching. The study utilised a thematic analysis approach to investigate the decision-making practices of a sample of high-level adventure sports coaches over a series of sessions. Results revealed that, in order to make judgements and decisions in practice, expert coaches employ a range of practical and pedagogic management strategies to create and opportunistically use time for decision-making. These approaches include span of control and time management strategies to facilitate the decision-making process regarding risk management, venue selection, aims, objectives, session content, and differentiation of the coaching process. The implication for coaches, coach education, and accreditation is the recognition and training of the approaches that "create time" for the judgements in practice, namely "creating space to think". The paper concludes by offering a template for a more expertise-focused progression in adventure sports coaching.

Although reports on big data success stories have been accumulating in the media, most organizations dealing with high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets still face challenges. Only a thorough understanding of these challenges puts organizations into a position in which...... they can make an informed decision for or against big data, and, if the decision is positive, overcome the challenges smoothly. The combination of a series of interviews with leading experts from enterprises, associations and research institutions, and focused literature reviews allowed not only...... framework are also relevant. For large enterprises and startups specialized in big data, it is typically easier to overcome the challenges than it is for other enterprises and public administration bodies....

The paper discusses the rewards and challenges of employing commercial audience measurements data – gathered by media industries for profitmaking purposes – in ethnographic research on the Internet in everyday life. It questions claims to the objectivity of big data (Anderson 2008), the assumption...... communication systems, language and behavior appear as texts, outputs, and discourses (data to be ‘found’) – big data then documents things that in earlier research required interviews and observations (data to be ‘made’) (Jensen 2014). However, web-measurement enterprises build audiences according...... to a commercial logic (boyd & Crawford 2011) and is as such directed by motives that call for specific types of sellable user data and specific segmentation strategies. In combining big data and ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1973) scholars need to question how ethnographic fieldwork might map the ‘data not seen...

Previous research has considered action and adventure sports using a variety of associated terms and definitions which has led to confusing discourse and contradictory research findings. Traditional narratives have typically considered participation exclusively as the pastime of young people with abnormal characteristics or personalities having unhealthy and pathological tendencies to take risks because of the need for thrill, excitement or an adrenaline 'rush'. Conversely, recent research has linked even the most extreme forms of action and adventure sports to positive physical and psychological health and well-being outcomes. Here, we argue that traditional frameworks have led to definitions, which, as currently used by researchers, ignore key elements constituting the essential merit of these sports. In this paper, we suggest that this lack of conceptual clarity in understanding cognitions, perception and action in action and adventure sports requires a comprehensive explanatory framework, ecological dynamics which considers person-environment interactions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Action and adventure sports can be fundamentally conceptualized as activities which flourish through creative exploration of novel movement experiences, continuously expanding and evolving beyond predetermined environmental, physical, psychological or sociocultural boundaries. The outcome is the emergence of a rich variety of participation styles and philosophical differences within and across activities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to point out some limitations of existing research on action and adventure sports; (b) based on key ideas from emerging research and an ecological dynamics approach, to propose a holistic multidisciplinary model for defining and understanding action and adventure sports that may better guide future research and practical implications.

The universe is the most efficient laboratory of particle physics and the understanding of cosmological processes implies the knowledge of how elementary particles interact. This article recalls the mutual influences between on the one hand: astrophysics and cosmology and on the other hand: nuclear physics and particle physics. The big-bang theory relies on nuclear physics to explain the successive stages of nucleo-synthesis and the study of solar neutrinos has led to discover new aspects of this particle: it is likely that neutrinos undergo oscillations from one neutrino type to another. In some universe events such as the bursting of a super-nova, particles are released with a kinetic energy that would be impossible to reach on earth with a particle accelerator. These events are become common points of interest between astrophysicists and particle physicists and have promoted a deeper cooperation between astrophysics and elementary particle physics. (A.C.)

The authors describe the connection between cosmology and particle physics in an introductory way. In this connection the big bang theory and unified gauge models of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions are considered. Furthermore cosmological nucleosynthesis is discussed in this framework, and the problem of cosmic neutrinos is considered with special regards to its rest mass. (HSI).

The conceptual design for the first-of-a-kind engineering of Thermal Engine Rocket Adventure (TERA) is described. TERA comprising the Battery Omnibus Reactor Integral System (BORIS) as the heat resource and the Space Propulsion Reactor Integral System (SPRIS) as the propulsion system, is one of the advanced Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) engine utilizing hydrogen (H 2 ) propellant being developed at present time. BORIS in this application is an open cycle high temperature gas cooled reactor that has eighteen fuel elements for propulsion and one fuel element for electricity generation and propellant pumping. Each fuel element for propulsion has its own small nozzle. The nineteen fuel elements are arranged into hexagonal prism shape in the core and surrounded by outer Be reflector. The TERA maximum power is 1,000 MW th , specific impulse 1,000 s, thrust 250,000 N, and the total mass is 550 kg including the reactor, turbo pump and auxiliaries. Each fuel element comprises the fuel assembly, moderators, pressure tube and small nozzle. The TERA fuel assembly is fabricated of 93% enriched 1.5 mm (U, Zr, Nb)C wafers in 25.3% voided Square Lattice Honeycomb (SLHC). The H 2 propellant passes through these flow channels. This study is concerned with thermohydrodynamic analysis of the fuel element for propulsion with hypothetical axial power distribution because nuclear analysis of TERA has not been performed yet. As a result, when the power distribution of INSPI's M-SLHC is applied to the fuel assembly, the local heat concentration of fuel is more serious and the pressure of the initial inlet H 2 is higher than those of constant average power distribution applied. This means the fuel assembly geometry of 1.5 mm fuel wafers and 25.3% voided SLHC needs to be changed in order to reduce thermal and mechanical shocks. (author)

Big Java: Late Objects is a comprehensive introduction to Java and computer programming, which focuses on the principles of programming, software engineering, and effective learning. It is designed for a two-semester first course in programming for computer science students.

In the last CentrePiece, John Van Reenen stressed the importance of competition and labour market flexibility for productivity growth. His latest in CEP's 'big ideas' series describes the impact of research on how policy-makers can influence innovation more directly - through tax credits for business spending on research and development.

The speed of development in Big Data and associated phenomena, such as social media, has surpassed the capacity of the average consumer to understand his or her actions and their knock-on effects. We are moving towards changes in how ethics has to be perceived: away from individual decisions with

Big Data in History introduces the project to create a world-historical archive, tracing the last four centuries of historical dynamics and change. Chapters address the archive's overall plan, how to interpret the past through a global archive, the missions of gathering records, linking local data into global patterns, and exploring the results.

The University of Montana (UM)-Missoula has implemented a problem-based program in which students perform scientific research focused on indoor air pollution. The Air Toxics Under the Big Sky program (Jones et al. 2007; Adams et al. 2008; Ward et al. 2008) provides a community-based framework for understanding the complex relationship between poor…

New ways of thinking about leadership require that leaders move their big desks and establish environments that encourage trust and open communication. Educational leaders must trust their colleagues to make wise choices. When teachers are treated democratically as leaders, classrooms will also become democratic learning organizations. (SM)

The February 2005 issue of The Science Teacher (TST) reminded everyone that by learning how scientists study stars, students gain an understanding of how science measures things that can not be set up in lab, either because they are too big, too far away, or happened in a very distant past. The authors of "How Far are the Stars?" show how the…

This paper contains a detailed discussion on new cosmic solutions describing the early and late evolution of a universe that is filled with a kind of dark energy that may or may not satisfy the energy conditions. The main distinctive property of the resulting space-times is that they make to appear twice the single singular events predicted by the corresponding quintessential (phantom) models in a manner which can be made symmetric with respect to the origin of cosmic time. Thus, big bang and big rip singularity are shown to take place twice, one on the positive branch of time and the other on the negative one. We have also considered dark energy and phantom energy accretion onto black holes and wormholes in the context of these new cosmic solutions. It is seen that the space-times of these holes would then undergo swelling processes leading to big trip and big hole events taking place on distinct epochs along the evolution of the universe. In this way, the possibility is considered that the past and future be connected in a non-paradoxical manner in the universes described by means of the new symmetric solutions

How did the Universe begin? The favoured theory is that everything - space, time, matter - came into existence at the same moment, around 13.7 thousand million years ago. This event was scornfully referred to as the "Big Bang" by Sir Fred Hoyle, who did not believe in it and maintained that the Universe had always existed.

The volume and variety of data being generated using computersis doubling every two years. It is estimated that in 2015,8 Zettabytes (Zetta=1021) were generated which consistedmostly of unstructured data such as emails, blogs, Twitter,Facebook posts, images, and videos. This is called big data. Itis possible to analyse ...

Big data benchmarking is particularly important and provides applicable yardsticks for evaluating booming big data systems. However, wide coverage and great complexity of big data computing impose big challenges on big data benchmarking. How can we construct a benchmark suite using a minimum set of units of computation to represent diversity of big data analytics workloads? Big data dwarfs are abstractions of extracting frequently appearing operations in big data computing. One dwarf represen...

The amount of computerized information that organizations collect and process is growing so large that the term Big Data is commonly being used to describe the situation. Accordingly, Big Data is defined by a combination of the Volume, Variety, Velocity, and Veracity of the data being processed. Big Data tools are already having an impact in…

Data cleansing approaches have usually focused on detecting and fixing errors with little attention to big data scaling. This presents a serious impediment since identify- ing and repairing dirty data often involves processing huge input datasets, handling sophisticated error discovery approaches and managing huge arbitrary errors. With large datasets, error detection becomes overly expensive and complicated especially when considering user-defined functions. Furthermore, a distinctive algorithm is de- sired to optimize inequality joins in sophisticated error discovery rather than na ̈ıvely parallelizing them. Also, when repairing large errors, their skewed distribution may obstruct effective error repairs. In this dissertation, I present solutions to overcome the above three problems in scaling data cleansing. First, I present BigDansing as a general system to tackle efficiency, scalability, and ease-of-use issues in data cleansing for Big Data. It automatically parallelizes the user’s code on top of general-purpose distributed platforms. Its programming inter- face allows users to express data quality rules independently from the requirements of parallel and distributed environments. Without sacrificing their quality, BigDans- ing also enables parallel execution of serial repair algorithms by exploiting the graph representation of discovered errors. The experimental results show that BigDansing outperforms existing baselines up to more than two orders of magnitude. Although BigDansing scales cleansing jobs, it still lacks the ability to handle sophisticated error discovery requiring inequality joins. Therefore, I developed IEJoin as an algorithm for fast inequality joins. It is based on sorted arrays and space efficient bit-arrays to reduce the problem’s search space. By comparing IEJoin against well- known optimizations, I show that it is more scalable, and several orders of magnitude faster. BigDansing depends on vertex-centric graph systems, i.e., Pregel

"Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." tells of King's childhood determination to use "big words" through biographical information and quotations. In this lesson, students in grades 3 to 5 explore information on Dr. King to think about his "big" words, then they write about their own…

"The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" (1906-1907) by Selma Lagerlof and "Scouting for Boys" (1908) by Robert Baden-Powell are characteristic of their time and their respective national and cultural contexts--the Swedish nation state of the early twentieth century and the British Empire. Taking its cue from recent theories on…

Full Text Available examines a project where text adventure games with a mathematical twist are deployed over Mxit which participants can play on their cell phones. In order to complete the puzzles laid out in the game, participants must do various arithmetic calculations....

This article examines a recurring trope in late Victorian ‘lost world’ adventure novels: the terrifying descent down a subterranean river into the bowels of the earth. More than simply an exciting episode, the subterranean river journey reflects narrative strategies and thematic concerns key to b...

This article reports on research that demonstrates how parents in first-generation Chinese families in Vancouver, Canada, most of them from Hong Kong, control their children's involvement in local adventure education (AE) programs and in so doing minimize the likelihood of intergenerational culture conflict involving those children. The research…

From an examination of the current textbooks and literature concerning judgment and decision-making models used in outdoor adventure leadership, it is easy to see that they are still deeply rooted in the classical decision-making theory. In this article, I will (a) outline the importance of good judgment and decision making in an outdoor adventure…

There has been increasing interest in recent years in the significance of a sense of place in the literature of outdoor adventure education. In the UK relationships between outdoor education and the environment still appear largely focused on the science of the natural environment and the activity in question. In this paper, we present empirical…

Outdoor adventure education (OAE) is philosophically rooted in Western values, yet it has been implemented in non-Western cultures, such as East Asia. This paper examines how OAE functions in East Asia, through data from Hong Kong. Although some cultural differences are clear, there is no compelling evidence that OAE cannot provide benefits in…

The value of outdoor adventure activities as part of the enviro course at Golden Gate Highlands National Park. Garth Johnson. Abstract. No Abstract. Full Text: EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT EMAIL FREE FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT · Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a ...

This study investigates the initial development of groupwork skills through outdoor adventure education (OAE) and the factors that predict the extent of this development, using the first two levels of Kirkpatrick's model of training evaluation. University students (N = 238) completed questionnaires measuring their initial reactions to OAE (Level 1…

Groupwork is an increasingly popular method of learning in higher education and the ability to work effectively with others is important for academic success and employability. This systematic review investigated the use of outdoor adventure education (OAE) in facilitating the development of transferable groupwork skills in higher education. The…

This article provides an overview of trip programming in Alaska for those seeking a low-cost wilderness adventure. Alaska is a land of glaciers, mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, and wildlife. Safety is a major concern when traveling in Alaska. A local guide or outdoor educator can assist with safety and logistical planning. Travelers should plan…

This article provides a rationale for using adventure-based counseling (ABC) principles to promote children's self-esteem through group work within the school setting. The effectiveness of combining Adlerian theory with ABC to promote self-esteem is established. The process that would allow a school counselor to plan, organize, facilitate,…

Adventure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy share elements, including transformation of distorted thinking patterns, a focus on current and future functioning, consideration of the counselor-client relationship, and the use of stress in the change process. Recognizing cognitive behavioral therapy as an empirically sound theory underlying…

CSI: The Experience, a traveling museum exhibit and a companion web adventure, was created through a grant from the National Science Foundation as a potential model for informal learning. The website was designed to enrich and complement the exhibit by modeling the forensic process. Substantive science, real-world lab techniques, and higher-level…

Examines, using a qualitative case study of stories printed in "The New York Times," the social construction of "runaway youth" in print media during 1960-1978. Finds that running away was an unconstructed problem (or simmering social condition) in the early 1960s and featured harmless adventures. Contributes to the…

In the 1970s a new form of outdoor trip programming appeared. Known as "common adventure," its best known trait is the absence of a designated leader. In 1970, Gary Grimm, the University of Oregon's first outdoor program coordinator, laid out the key principles: self-directed learning, formation of groups of people with similar interests…

The product of a 3,355 mile bicycle trip involving a co-ed group of teenagers and a leader (N=12), this guide to bike riding trips presents practical and philosophical insights gained by the Project Adventure leader who conducted the trip. Detailed lists of pre- and on-trip requirements are presented. Specifically, there are sections devoted to…

Nature continually impresses humans in its role as an omnipresent, if not ultimate, source of power. One hallmark of outdoor and adventure education (OAE) has been its presumption that humans' interaction with aspects of Nature's "power" promotes the antecedents of leadership: measurable, persistent psychological effects and behavioral…

Describes an outdoor adventure camp to help mental health consumers and nursing students explore the issues of mental health and illness through experiential and perceived risk challenges. Evaluation data reveals a breakdown in the stigma of mental illness as consumers and students came to know, trust, and count on each other in order to succeed…

In adventure racing, or multisporting, athletes perform multiple disciplines over a course in rugged, often remote, wilderness terrain. Disciplines may include, but are not limited to, hiking, trail running, mountain biking, caving, technical climbing, fixed-line mountaineering, flat- and white-water boating, and orienteering. While sprint races may be as short as 6 hours, expedition-length adventure races last a minimum of 36 hours up to 10 days or more and may cover hundreds of kilometres. Over the past decade, adventure racing has grown in popularity throughout the world with increasing numbers of events and participants each year. The provision of on-site medical care during these events is essential to ensure the health and safety of the athletes and thus the success of the sport. At present, there are no formal guidelines and a relatively small amount of literature to assist in the development of medical support plans for these events. This article provides an introduction to the provision of medical support for adventure races. Since a wide variety of illness and injury occur during these events, the medical support plan should provide for proper personnel, equipment and supplies to provide care for a wide range of illness and injury. Foot-related problems are the most common reasons for athletes to require medical attention during these events. This article also highlights some of the controversies involved in the provision of medical support for these events. Suggested penalties for acceptance of medical care during the event and strategies for removal of an athlete from the event for medical reasons are offered. In addition, some of the challenges involved in the provision of medical support, including communication, logistics and liability are discussed. This information should prove useful for medical directors of future, similar events. Because of their extreme nature, expedition-length adventure races represent a new and unique area of wilderness and

Certain athletic activities and lifestyles require a completely stable and very mobile hip. Total hip replacement with a natural femoral head size and two mobile-bearing surfaces (i.e., a "tripolar" prosthesis) is the most stable prosthesis. Elegant design and wear-resistant bearing surfaces are the keys to long-term implant survivorship. The hypothesis is that a ceramic-coated tripolar prosthesis using highly cross-linked polyethylene can provide full function and complete stability with low wear. This study sought to determine: (1) patient-reported outcomes, (2) functional outcomes, (3) implant survivorship and complications, and (4) postoperative sexual limitations. Between 1998 and 2011, the author performed 160 primary total hip replacements using tripolar prostheses in patients participating in adventure sports and other physically demanding activities. The institutional review board approved this study. The inclusion criteria were patients who needed unrestricted activity and who were not candidates for or did not choose hip resurfacing. Patients were followed every second year and assessed with radiographs, Harris Hip Score, WOMAC, SF-12, and UCLA functional outcome scores. Patients were asked about symptoms of instability and satisfaction with their hip replacement. Patients were asked both preoperatively and 2 years postoperatively four questions about their sexual activity. Mean follow-up was 11 years. At 2 years' postoperatively, 98% of patients reported their satisfaction as excellent or good and 99% were not limited for sexual activity following surgery. Seventy-four percent of patients reported they were recovered within 6 weeks of surgery. There were no dislocations. There were three revision procedures for implant loosening, infection, and periprosthetic fracture, but there were no failures of the tripolar articulation. The mean postoperative UCLA score was the highly athletic score of 8. There were no signs of osteolysis, wear, or metal

My adventures in infrared astronomy started when I was a grad student in 1965 with the discovery of an infrared-bright object (now known as the Becklin-Neugebauer Object) in the Orion Nebula. In 1966, I made the first measurements of the infrared radiation from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. I was fortunate enough to be able to take advantage of the 2.2 micron sky survey carried out by Neugebauer and Leighton (1969), which produced many remarkable discoveries, the most spectacular being the heavily dust-embedded carbon star IRC+10216, thebrightest object in the sky at 5 microns outside the solar system. In the 1970’s there was a growth in Infrared astronomy with the availability of many new facilities such as the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, (KAO) which I used extensively with Mike Werner and Ian Gatley for many unique observations. In 1977, I moved to Hawaii to work on the NASA IRTF 3- meter telescope. Many discoveries were made, including the first direct measurements of the rings of Jupiter at 2.2 microns (with Gareth Wynn-Williams) and the discovery of the first L dwarf star around a white dwarf (with Ben Zuckerman). In the 1980’s the introduction of large format arrays changed the way we did infrared astronomy. With Ian McLean, I moved to UCLA in 1990 to start the IR lab and get involved in Keck development and science. In 1995, Andrea, Ghez, Mark Morris and I started looking for evidence of a possible massive Black Hole in the Galactic Center. Spectacular observations using the Keck10 meter telescopes with large format near-infrared arrays and adaptive optics led to the confirmation of the presence of such a black hole and an estimate of its mass (4xE6 M (Sun)). In 1996, I began working on the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and I will finish my talk by discussing SOFIA observations of the ring of dust and gas orbiting the massive black hole in the center

Full Text Available Big data is the term for any gathering of information sets, so expensive and complex, that it gets to be hard to process for utilizing customary information handling applications. The difficulties incorporate investigation, catch, duration, inquiry, sharing, stockpiling, Exchange, perception, and protection infringement. To reduce spot business patterns, anticipate diseases, conflict etc., we require bigger data sets when compared with the smaller data sets. Enormous information is hard to work with utilizing most social database administration frameworks and desktop measurements and perception bundles, needing rather enormously parallel programming running on tens, hundreds, or even a large number of servers. In this paper there was an observation on Hadoop architecture, different tools used for big data and its security issues.

Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, has become a precise physical science, the foundation of which is our understanding of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) left from the big bang. The story of the discovery and exploration of the CMBR in the 1960s is recalled for the first time in this collection of 44 essays by eminent scientists who pioneered the work. Two introductory chapters put the essays in context, explaining the general ideas behind the expanding universe and fossil remnants from the early stages of the expanding universe. The last chapter describes how the confusion of ideas and measurements in the 1960s grew into the present tight network of tests that demonstrate the accuracy of the big bang theory. This book is valuable to anyone interested in how science is done, and what it has taught us about the large-scale nature of the physical universe.

data is constituted as an aspiration to improve the data and knowledge underpinning development efforts. Based on this framework, we argue that big data’s impact on how relevant problems are governed is enabled by (1) new techniques of visualizing development issues, (2) linking aspects......This paper conceptualizes how large-scale data and algorithms condition and reshape knowledge production when addressing international development challenges. The concept of governmentality and four dimensions of an analytics of government are proposed as a theoretical framework to examine how big...... of international development agendas to algorithms that synthesize large-scale data, (3) novel ways of rationalizing knowledge claims that underlie development efforts, and (4) shifts in professional and organizational identities of those concerned with producing and processing data for development. Our discussion...

Much of the debate on the safety of nuclear power focuses on the large number of fatalities that could, in theory, be caused by extremely unlikely but just imaginable reactor accidents. This, along with the nuclear industry's inappropriate use of vocabulary during public debate, has given the general public a distorted impression of the risks of nuclear power. The paper reviews the way in which the probability and consequences of big nuclear accidents have been presented in the past and makes recommendations for the future, including the presentation of the long-term consequences of such accidents in terms of 'loss of life expectancy', 'increased chance of fatal cancer' and 'equivalent pattern of compulsory cigarette smoking'. The paper presents mathematical arguments, which show the derivation and validity of the proposed methods of presenting the consequences of imaginable big nuclear accidents. (author)

The dynamics of an inhomogeneous universe is studied with the methods of loop quantum cosmology, via a so-called hybrid quantization, as an example of the quantization of vacuum cosmological spacetimes containing gravitational waves (Gowdy spacetimes). The analysis of this model with an infinite number of degrees of freedom, performed at the effective level, shows that (i) the initial Big Bang singularity is replaced (as in the case of homogeneous cosmological models) by a Big Bounce, joining deterministically two large universes, (ii) the universe size at the bounce is at least of the same order of magnitude as that of the background homogeneous universe and (iii) for each gravitational wave mode, the difference in amplitude at very early and very late times has a vanishing statistical average when the bounce dynamics is strongly dominated by the inhomogeneities, whereas this average is positive when the dynamics is in a near-vacuum regime, so that statistically the inhomogeneities are amplified. (fast track communication)

In the American Mathematical Society's first-ever book for kids (and kids at heart), mathematician and author Richard Evan Schwartz leads math lovers of all ages on an innovative and strikingly illustrated journey through the infinite number system. By means of engaging, imaginative visuals and endearing narration, Schwartz manages the monumental task of presenting the complex concept of Big Numbers in fresh and relatable ways. The book begins with small, easily observable numbers before building up to truly gigantic ones, like a nonillion, a tredecillion, a googol, and even ones too huge for names! Any person, regardless of age, can benefit from reading this book. Readers will find themselves returning to its pages for a very long time, perpetually learning from and growing with the narrative as their knowledge deepens. Really Big Numbers is a wonderful enrichment for any math education program and is enthusiastically recommended to every teacher, parent and grandparent, student, child, or other individual i...

Big Bang Circus is an opera I composed in 2001 and which was premiered at the Venice Biennale Contemporary Music Festival in 2002. A chamber group, four singers and a ringmaster stage the story of the Universe confronting and interweaving two threads: how early man imagined it and how scientists described it. Surprisingly enough fancy, myths and scientific explanations often end up using the same images, metaphors and sometimes even words: a strong tension, a drumskin starting to vibrate, a shout…

To provide an editorial introduction into the 2014 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics with an overview of the content, the new publishing scheme, and upcoming 25th anniversary. A brief overview of the 2014 special topic, Big Data - Smart Health Strategies, and an outline of the novel publishing model is provided in conjunction with a call for proposals to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Yearbook. 'Big Data' has become the latest buzzword in informatics and promise new approaches and interventions that can improve health, well-being, and quality of life. This edition of the Yearbook acknowledges the fact that we just started to explore the opportunities that 'Big Data' will bring. However, it will become apparent to the reader that its pervasive nature has invaded all aspects of biomedical informatics - some to a higher degree than others. It was our goal to provide a comprehensive view at the state of 'Big Data' today, explore its strengths and weaknesses, as well as its risks, discuss emerging trends, tools, and applications, and stimulate the development of the field through the aggregation of excellent survey papers and working group contributions to the topic. For the first time in history will the IMIA Yearbook be published in an open access online format allowing a broader readership especially in resource poor countries. For the first time, thanks to the online format, will the IMIA Yearbook be published twice in the year, with two different tracks of papers. We anticipate that the important role of the IMIA yearbook will further increase with these changes just in time for its 25th anniversary in 2016.

If the hot Big Bang model is correct, the very early universe provides us with a good laboratory to test our ideas on particle physics. The temperature and the density at that time are so high that each known particle must exist in chemical and in thermal equilibrium with the others. When the universe cools, the particles freeze out, leaving us today with a cosmic background. Such a kind of relic is of great interest because we can probe the Big Bang Model by studying the fossilized gas of a known particle. Conversely we can use that model to derive information about a hypothetical particle. Basically the freezing of a gas occurs a temperature T o and may be thermal or chemical. Studying the decoupling of a stable neutrino brings information on its mass: if the mass M ν lies in the forbidden range, the neutrino has to be unstable and its lifetime is constrained by cosmology. As for the G.U.T. Monopole, cosmology tells us that its present mass density is either to big or to small (1 monopole/observable universe) owing to a predicted flux far from the Parker Limit. Finally, the super red-giant star life time constrains the axion or the Higgs to be more massive than .2 MeV [fr

What is everything really made of? If we split matter down into smaller and infinitesimally smaller pieces, where do we arrive? At the Particle Zoo - the extraordinary subatomic world of antimatter, neutrinos, strange-flavoured quarks and yetis, gravitons, ghosts and glueballs, mindboggling eleven-dimensional strings and the elusive Higgs boson itself. Be guided around this strangest of zoos by Gavin Hesketh, experimental particle physicist at humanity's greatest experiment, the Large Hadron Collider. Concisely and with a rare clarity, he demystifies how we are uncovering the inner workings of the universe and heading towards the next scientific revolution. Why are atoms so small? How did the Higgs boson save the universe? And is there a theory of everything? The Particle Zoo answers these and many other profound questions, and explains the big ideas of Quantum Physics, String Theory, The Big Bang and Dark Matter...and, ultimately, what we know about the true, fundamental nature of reality.

The features of three big solar flares observed at Tokyo Observatory are described in this paper. The active region, McMath 14943, caused a big flare on September 16, 1977. The flare appeared on both sides of a long dark line which runs along the boundary of the magnetic field. Two-ribbon structure was seen. The electron density of the flare observed at Norikura Corona Observatory was 3 x 10 12 /cc. Several arc lines which connect both bright regions of different magnetic polarity were seen in H-α monochrome image. The active region, McMath 15056, caused a big flare on December 10, 1977. At the beginning, several bright spots were observed in the region between two main solar spots. Then, the area and the brightness increased, and the bright spots became two ribbon-shaped bands. A solar flare was observed on April 8, 1978. At first, several bright spots were seen around the solar spot in the active region, McMath 15221. Then, these bright spots developed to a large bright region. On both sides of a dark line along the magnetic neutral line, bright regions were generated. These developed to a two-ribbon flare. The time required for growth was more than one hour. A bright arc which connects two ribbons was seen, and this arc may be a loop prominence system. (Kato, T.)

The so-called big data revolution provides substantial opportunities to diabetes management. At least 3 important directions are currently of great interest. First, the integration of different sources of information, from primary and secondary care to administrative information, may allow depicting a novel view of patient’s care processes and of single patient’s behaviors, taking into account the multifaceted nature of chronic care. Second, the availability of novel diabetes technologies, able to gather large amounts of real-time data, requires the implementation of distributed platforms for data analysis and decision support. Finally, the inclusion of geographical and environmental information into such complex IT systems may further increase the capability of interpreting the data gathered and extract new knowledge from them. This article reviews the main concepts and definitions related to big data, it presents some efforts in health care, and discusses the potential role of big data in diabetes care. Finally, as an example, it describes the research efforts carried on in the MOSAIC project, funded by the European Commission. PMID:25910540

High energy physics is a basic research domain with a well established European and international cooperation. Cooperation can be of different type depending on the size of the facilities involved (accelerators), on their financing, and on the type of experiments that use these facilities. The CERN, the European center for nuclear research, created in October 1954, is the best example of such a cooperation. This article examines first the juridical and scientifical structure of the CERN and the mode of organization of big experiments. Then, it presents the role of international committees in the establishment of a common scientific policy in Europe and in the rest of the world. Finally, the possible future evolution of the CERN towards a worldwide project is evoked. (J.S.)

Following the holographic description of linear dilaton null Cosmologies with a Big Bang in terms of Matrix String Theory put forward by Craps, Sethi and Verlinde, we propose an extended background describing a Universe including both Big Bang and Big Crunch singularities. This belongs to a class of exact string backgrounds and is perturbative in the string coupling far away from the singularities, both of which can be resolved using Matrix String Theory. We provide a simple theory capable of...

France is considering expanding its network of enviromental laboratories to study the long term impacts of environmental change. It has been suggested that this could be funded using the 'big science' budget usually used for facilities such as particle accelerators (2 para).

Keywords: ecocriticism, bad humans activities, marine life, Sammy's Adventure: the Secret Passage movie. The balance of marine life is often damaged by irresponsible humans who do not care about their environment. This problem has inspired some works to criticize humans' reckless behavior toward environment, especially ocean. Sammy's Adventure: the Secret Passage is one of the examples that have been created to criticize the bad human activities in the ocean. This research applies ecocritici...

The study examined relationships between the Big Five personality traits and thematic content extracted from self-reports of life history data. One hundred and five "mature age" university students (M=30.1 years) completed the NEO PI-R trait measure, and the Personality Web Protocol. The protocol examines constituents of identity by asking participants to describe 24 key "attachments" from their life histories (significant events, people, places, objects, and possessions). Participants sorted these attachments into clusters and provided a self-descriptive label for each cluster (e.g., "adventurous self"). It was predicted that the thematic content of these cluster labels would be systematically related to Big Five trait scores (e.g., that labels referring to strength or positive emotions would be linked to Extraversion). The hypothesized links were obtained for each of the Big Five trait domains except Conscientiousness. Results are discussed with a view to broadening our understanding of the Five-Factor Model in relation to units of personality other than traits.

The reparametrization-invariant generating functional for the unitary and causal perturbation theory in general relativity in a finite space-time is obtained. The classical cosmology of a Universe and the Faddeev-Popov-DeWitt functional correspond to different orders of decomposition of this functional over the inverse 'mass' of a Universe. It is shown that the invariant content of general relativity as a constrained system can be covered by two 'equivalent' unconstrained systems: the 'dynamic' (with 'dynamic' time as the cosmic scale factor and conformal field variables) and 'geometric' (given by the Levi-Civita type canonical transformation to the action-angle variables which determine initial cosmological states with the arrow of the proper time measured by the watch of an observer in the comoving frame). 'Big Bang', the Hubble evolution, and creation of 'dynamic' particles by the 'geometric' vacuum are determined by 'relations' between the dynamic and geometric systems as pure relativistic phenomena, like the Lorentz-type 'relation' between the rest and comoving frames in special relativity

Full Text Available According to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology, there should be a background of cosmic neutrinos in the present Universe, similar to the cosmic microwave photon background. The weakness of the weak interactions renders this neutrino background undetectable with current technology. The cosmic neutrino background can, however, be probed indirectly through its cosmological effects on big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN and the cosmic microwave background (CMB radiation. In this BBN review, focused on neutrinos and more generally on dark radiation, the BBN constraints on the number of “equivalent neutrinos” (dark radiation, on the baryon asymmetry (baryon density, and on a possible lepton asymmetry (neutrino degeneracy are reviewed and updated. The BBN constraints on dark radiation and on the baryon density following from considerations of the primordial abundances of deuterium and helium-4 are in excellent agreement with the complementary results from the CMB, providing a suggestive, but currently inconclusive, hint of the presence of dark radiation, and they constrain any lepton asymmetry. For all the cases considered here there is a “lithium problem”: the BBN-predicted lithium abundance exceeds the observationally inferred primordial value by a factor of ~3.

Big data and data analytics offer the promise to enhance teaching and learning, improve educational research and progress education governance. This chapter aims to contribute to the conceptual and methodological understanding of big data and analytics within educational research. It describes the opportunities and challenges that big data and analytics bring to education as well as critically explore the perils of applying a data driven approach to education. Despite the claimed value of the...

The Big Green initiative on California's ballot lost by a margin of 2-to-1. Green measures lost in five other states, shocking ecology-minded groups. According to the postmortem by environmentalists, Big Green was a victim of poor timing and big spending by the opposition. Now its supporters plan to break up the bill and try to pass some provisions in the Legislature

Significant work has been done in the field of big data in last decade. The concept of big data includes analysing voluminous data to extract valuable information. In the fashion world, big data is increasingly playing a part in trend forecasting, analysing consumer behaviour, preference and emotions. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the term fashion data and why it can be considered as big data. It also gives a broad classification of the types of fashion data and briefly defines them. Also, the methodology and working of a system that will use this data is briefly described.

Full Text Available Big data is a data beyond the storage capacity and beyond the processing power is called big data. Big data term is used for data sets its so large or complex that traditional data it involves data sets with sizes. Big data size is a constantly moving target year by year ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data means like social networking sites the amount of data produced by people is growing rapidly every year. Big data is not only a data rather it become a complete subject which includes various tools techniques and framework. It defines the epidemic possibility and evolvement of data both structured and unstructured. Big data is a set of techniques and technologies that require new forms of assimilate to uncover large hidden values from large datasets that are diverse complex and of a massive scale. It is difficult to work with using most relational database management systems and desktop statistics and visualization packages exacting preferably massively parallel software running on tens hundreds or even thousands of servers. Big data environment is used to grab organize and resolve the various types of data. In this paper we describe applications problems and tools of big data and gives overview of big data.

In discussing the viability of the big-bang model of the Universe relative evidence is examined including the discrepancies in the age of the big-bang Universe, the red shifts of quasars, the microwave background radiation, general theory of relativity aspects such as the change of the gravitational constant with time, and quantum theory considerations. It is felt that the arguments considered show that the big-bang picture is not as soundly established, either theoretically or observationally, as it is usually claimed to be, that the cosmological problem is still wide open and alternatives to the standard big-bang picture should be seriously investigated. (U.K.)

How Big is Earth celebrates the Year of Light. Using only the sunlight striking the Earth and a wooden dowel, students meet each other and then measure the circumference of the earth. Eratosthenes did it over 2,000 years ago. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan shared the process by which Eratosthenes measured the angle of the shadow cast at local noon when sunlight strikes a stick positioned perpendicular to the ground. By comparing his measurement to another made a distance away, Eratosthenes was able to calculate the circumference of the earth. How Big is Earth provides an online learning environment where students do science the same way Eratosthenes did. A notable project in which this was done was The Eratosthenes Project, conducted in 2005 as part of the World Year of Physics; in fact, we will be drawing on the teacher's guide developed by that project.How Big Is Earth? expands on the Eratosthenes project by providing an online learning environment provided by the iCollaboratory, www.icollaboratory.org, where teachers and students from Sweden, China, Nepal, Russia, Morocco, and the United States collaborate, share data, and reflect on their learning of science and astronomy. They are sharing their information and discussing their ideas/brainstorming the solutions in a discussion forum. There is an ongoing database of student measurements and another database to collect data on both teacher and student learning from surveys, discussions, and self-reflection done online.We will share our research about the kinds of learning that takes place only in global collaborations.The entrance address for the iCollaboratory is http://www.icollaboratory.org.

Much of what constitutes Big Data is information about us. Through our online activities, we leave an easy-to-follow trail of digital footprints that reveal who we are, what we buy, where we go, and much more. This eye-opening book explores the raging privacy debate over the use of personal data, with one undeniable conclusion: once data's been collected, we have absolutely no control over who uses it or how it is used. Personal data is the hottest commodity on the market today-truly more valuable than gold. We are the asset that every company, industry, non-profit, and government wants. Pri

Visualization is a crucial component of data analysis. It is always a good idea to plot the data before fitting models, making predictions, or drawing conclusions. As sensors of the electric grid are collecting large volumes of data from various sources, power industry professionals are facing th...... the challenge of visualizing such data in a timely fashion. In this article, we demonstrate several data-visualization solutions for big energy data through three case studies involving smart-meter data, phasor measurement unit (PMU) data, and probabilistic forecasts, respectively....

Full Text Available The amount of data that is traveling across the internet today, not only that is large, but is complex as well. Companies, institutions, healthcare system etc., all of them use piles of data which are further used for creating reports in order to ensure continuity regarding the services that they have to offer. The process behind the results that these entities requests represents a challenge for software developers and companies that provide IT infrastructure. The challenge is how to manipulate an impressive volume of data that has to be securely delivered through the internet and reach its destination intact. This paper treats the challenges that Big Data creates.

We propose that a handle could be put on big data by looking at the systems that actually generate the data, rather than the data itself, realizing that there may be only few generic processes involved in this, each one imprinting its very specific structures in the space of systems, the traces of which translate into feature space. From this, we propose a practical computational clustering approach, optimized for coping with such data, inspired by how the human cortex is known to approach the problem.

The light-like linear dilaton background represents a particularly simple time-dependent 1/2 BPS solution of critical type IIA superstring theory in ten dimensions. Its lift to M-theory, as well as its Einstein frame metric, are singular in the sense that the geometry is geodesically incomplete and the Riemann tensor diverges along a light-like subspace of codimension one. We study this background as a model for a big bang type singularity in string theory/M-theory. We construct the dual Matr...

The following topics are dealt with: Research from the highest energies to the smallest particles at CERN, the laborious way to the Large Hadronic Collider, CERN as accelerator of techniques, culture, and society, a philosophical and sociological perspective of questions concerning CERN, quark matter research at CERN, the FAIR facility for antiproton and ion research. (HSI)

This paper analyzes the relationship between firms’ use of big data analytics and their innovative performance for product innovations. Since big data technologies provide new data information practices, they create new decision-making possibilities, which firms can use to realize innovations. Applying German firm-level data we find suggestive evidence that big data analytics matters for the likelihood of becoming a product innovator as well as the market success of the firms’ product innovat...

This paper analyzes the relationship between firms’ use of big data analytics and their innovative performance in terms of product innovations. Since big data technologies provide new data information practices, they create novel decision-making possibilities, which are widely believed to support firms’ innovation process. Applying German firm-level data within a knowledge production function framework we find suggestive evidence that big data analytics is a relevant determinant for the likel...

Until now, most major medical advancements have been achieved through hypothesis-driven research within the scope of clinical trials. However, due to a multitude of variables, only a certain number of research questions could be addressed during a single study, thus rendering these studies expensive and time consuming. Big data acquisition enables a new data-based approach in which large volumes of data can be used to investigate all variables, thus opening new horizons. Due to universal digitalization of the data as well as ever-improving hard- and software solutions, imaging would appear to be predestined for such analyses. Several small studies have already demonstrated that automated analysis algorithms and artificial intelligence can identify pathologies with high precision. Such automated systems would also seem well suited for rheumatology imaging, since a method for individualized risk stratification has long been sought for these patients. However, despite all the promising options, the heterogeneity of the data and highly complex regulations covering data protection in Germany would still render a big data solution for imaging difficult today. Overcoming these boundaries is challenging, but the enormous potential advances in clinical management and science render pursuit of this goal worthwhile.

The thesis analyzes and comments on the two main characters in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn so as to reveal the truth that to win both physical and psychological freedom in the society, we must learn to stand on ourselves. It begins with a brief introduction to the author, the novel and the paper thesis. Then, the author discloses the freedom-fighting process of the two main characters and the functions of Mississippi River and the raft in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn: On the hegira, Huck realizes the cruelty, greed, murder, trickery, hypocrisy, racism, and a general lack of morality of the society;Jim, with his in-telligence and compassion, wins his freedom;the Mississippi River and the raft are symbols of freedom. Finally, the author reveals that to win both physical and psychological freedom, one must rely on his or her own efforts.

Quarks, Leptons and The Big Bang, Third Edition, is a clear, readable and self-contained introduction to particle physics and related areas of cosmology. It bridges the gap between non-technical popular accounts and textbooks for advanced students. The book concentrates on presenting the subject from the modern perspective of quarks, leptons and the forces between them. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and general science readers interested in fundamental ideas of modern physics. This edition brings the book completely up to date by including advances in particle physics and cosmology, such as the discovery of the Higgs boson, the LIGO gravitational wave discovery and the WMAP and PLANCK results.

The purpose of this minor thesis is to describe the customer relationship management of information system, to analize the problem of customer relationship management information system, and to give an alternative solution or a new customer relationship management information system recommendation to UD. Iwek-P Adventure. Through Customer Relationship Management, companies can improve interaction with customers, not only interact directly but also at the time online, and Customer Relationship...

An explosion of scientific and technological advances has broadened the field of biomedicine. Traditional boundaries between the public and private research sectors are now blurred by multidisciplinary projects and the necessity for new and more efficient models of the translational process. This allows the adventurous scientist to boldly and consciously sample selected skills during periods of secondment in different institutions and organizations, and to assemble a personal and unique blend of competences to help them manage their career.

This paper briefly reviews the literature on the emerging concept of eco-adventure and cultural tourism, dubbed "green and gold tourism," respectively. It provides the rationale for conducting such a study in the Philippines (why the concern for inclusivity and environmental sustainability in tourism). It then establishes the feasible scope of such study and lists illustrative activities of inclusive and sustainable green and gold tourism. It also identifies concerns and issues about green an...

Client safety is a major risk management concern for the commercial adventure tourism sector in New Zealand. This study built on previous exploratory analyses of New Zealand adventure tourism safety, including industry surveys conducted by these authors in 1999 and 2003. The aims of the study were to provide a continuation of injury monitoring across the sector through data collected from self-reported injury incidence by industry operators and to compare findings with those from other primary and secondary research studies conducted by the authors. A postal questionnaire was used to survey all identifiable New Zealand adventure tourism operators during 2006. The questionnaire asked respondents about their recorded client injury experience, perceptions of client injury risk factors, and safety management practices. Some 21 adventure tourism activities were represented among the responding sample (n = 127), with most operations being very small in terms of staff numbers, although responding operators catered to nearly 1 million clients in total annually. Highest ranked risk factors for client injury included clients not following instructions; level of client skill, ability, and fitness; and changeable/unpredictable weather conditions. Highest client injury was reported for horse riding, ecotourism, and white water rafting sectors, although serious underreporting of minor injuries was evidenced across the sector. Slips, trips, and falls were the most frequently reported injury mechanism, while safety management measures were inconsistently applied across the sector. The industry should address reporting culture issues and safety management practices generally. Specifically, the industry should consider risk management that focuses on minor (eg, falls) as well as catastrophic events.

The author considers experiments to confirm the substantial deviations from a Planck curve in the Woody and Richards spectrum of the microwave background, and search for conducting needles in our galaxy. Spectral deviations and needle-shaped grains are expected for a cold Big Bang, but are not required by a hot Big Bang. (Auth.)

Since 2014 I am involved in various (research) projects that try to make the hype around Big Data more concrete and tangible for the industry and government. Big Data is about multiple sources of (real-time) data that can be analysed, transformed to information and be used to make 'smart' decisions.

Big Data and analytics have gained a huge momentum in recent years. Big Data feeds into the field of Learning Analytics (LA) that may allow academic institutions to better understand the learners' needs and proactively address them. Hence, it is important to have an understanding of Big Data and its applications. The purpose of this descriptive paper is to provide an overview of Big Data, the technologies used in Big Data, and some of the applications of Big Data in educa...

This qualitative study presents the view that coaching practice places demands on the coach's adaptability and flexibility. These requirements for being adaptive and flexible are met through a careful process of professional judgement and decision-making based on context-appropriate bodies of knowledge. Adventure sports coaches were selected for study on the basis that adventure sports create a hyper-dynamic environment in which these features can be examined. Thematic analysis revealed that coaches were generally well informed and practised with respect to the technical aspects of their sporting disciplines. Less positively, however, they often relied on ad hoc contextualisation of generalised theories of coaching practice to respond to the hyper-dynamic environments encountered in adventure sports. We propose that coaching practice reflects the demands of the environment, individual learning needs of the students and the task at hand. Together, these factors outwardly resemble a constraints-led approach but, we suggest, actually reflect manipulation of these parameters from a cognitive rather than an ecological perspective. This process is facilitated by a refined judgement and decision-making process, sophisticated epistemology and an explicit interaction of coaching components.

Full Text Available This paper shows how big data analysis opens a range of research and technological problems and calls for new approaches. We start with defining the essential properties of big data and discussing the main types of data involved. We then survey the dedicated solutions for storing and processing big data, including a data lake, virtual integration, and a polystore architecture. Difficulties in managing data quality and provenance are also highlighted. The characteristics of big data imply also specific requirements and challenges for data mining algorithms, which we address as well. The links with related areas, including data streams and deep learning, are discussed. The common theme that naturally emerges from this characterization is complexity. All in all, we consider it to be the truly defining feature of big data (posing particular research and technological challenges, which ultimately seems to be of greater importance than the sheer data volume.

On a flat, red mulga plain in the outback of Western Australia, preparations are under way to build the most audacious telescope astronomers have ever dreamed of - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Next-generation telescopes usually aim to double the performance of their predecessors. The Australian arm of SKA will deliver a 168-fold leap on the best technology available today, to show us the universe as never before. It will tune into signals emitted just a million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was a sea of hydrogen gas, slowly percolating with the first galaxies. Their starlight illuminated the fledgling universe in what is referred to as the “cosmic dawn”.

This paper describes the design and the capabilities of the Naval Research Laboratory Big Optical Array (BOA), an interferometric optical array for high-resolution imaging of stars, stellar systems, and other celestial objects. There are four important differences between the BOA design and the design of Mark III Optical Interferometer on Mount Wilson (California). These include a long passive delay line which will be used in BOA to do most of the delay compensation, so that the fast delay line will have a very short travel; the beam combination in BOA will be done in triplets, to allow measurement of closure phase; the same light will be used for both star and fringe tracking; and the fringe tracker will use several wavelength channels

Much of the debate on the safety of nuclear power focuses on the large number of fatalities that could, in theory, be caused by extremely unlikely but imaginable reactor accidents. This, along with the nuclear industry's inappropriate use of vocabulary during public debate, has given the general public a distorted impression of the safety of nuclear power. The way in which the probability and consequences of big nuclear accidents have been presented in the past is reviewed and recommendations for the future are made including the presentation of the long-term consequences of such accidents in terms of 'reduction in life expectancy', 'increased chance of fatal cancer' and the equivalent pattern of compulsory cigarette smoking. (author)

As one of the very few people in the world to give the “go/no go” decision to detonate a nuclear device, Austin “Mac” McGuire holds a very special place in the history of both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the world. As Commander of Joint Task Force Unit 8.1.1, on Christmas Island in the spring and summer of 1962, Mac directed the Los Alamos data collection efforts for twelve of the last atmospheric nuclear detonations conducted by the United States. Since data collection was at the heart of nuclear weapon testing, it fell to Mac to make the ultimate decision to detonate each test device. He calls his experience THE LAST BIG BANG, since these tests, part of Operation Dominic, were characterized by the dramatic displays of the heat, light, and sounds unique to atmospheric nuclear detonations – never, perhaps, to be witnessed again.

The light-like linear dilaton background represents a particularly simple time-dependent 1/2 BPS solution of critical type-IIA superstring theory in ten dimensions. Its lift to M-theory, as well as its Einstein frame metric, are singular in the sense that the geometry is geodesically incomplete and the Riemann tensor diverges along a light-like subspace of codimension one. We study this background as a model for a big bang type singularity in string theory/M-theory. We construct the dual Matrix theory description in terms of a (1+1)-d supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on a time-dependent world-sheet given by the Milne orbifold of (1+1)-d Minkowski space. Our model provides a framework in which the physics of the singularity appears to be under control

The light-like linear dilaton background represents a particularly simple time-dependent 1/2 BPS solution of critical type-IIA superstring theory in ten dimensions. Its lift to M-theory, as well as its Einstein frame metric, are singular in the sense that the geometry is geodesically incomplete and the Riemann tensor diverges along a light-like subspace of codimension one. We study this background as a model for a big bang type singularity in string theory/M-theory. We construct the dual Matrix theory description in terms of a (1+1)-d supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on a time-dependent world-sheet given by the Milne orbifold of (1+1)-d Minkowski space. Our model provides a framework in which the physics of the singularity appears to be under control.

Following the holographic description of linear dilaton null cosmologies with a big bang in terms of matrix string theory put forward by Craps, Sethi, and Verlinde, we propose an extended background describing a universe including both big bang and big crunch singularities. This belongs to a class of exact string backgrounds and is perturbative in the string coupling far away from the singularities, both of which can be resolved using matrix string theory. We provide a simple theory capable of describing the complete evolution of this closed universe

Several studies have indicated that there are significant returns on financial investment via "Big Science" centres. Financial multipliers ranging from 2.7 (ESA) to 3.7 (CERN) have been found, meaning that each Euro invested in industry by Big Science generates a two- to fourfold return for the supplier. Moreover, laboratories such as CERN are proud of their record in technology transfer, where research developments lead to applications in other fields - for example, with particle accelerators and detectors. Less well documented, however, is the effect of the experience that technological firms gain through working in the arena of Big Science. Indeed, up to now there has been no explicit empirical study of such benefits. Our findings reveal a variety of outcomes, which include technological learning, the development of new products and markets, and impact on the firm's organization. The study also demonstrates the importance of technologically challenging projects for staff at CERN. Together, these findings i...

Big Bang nucleosynthesis provides a unique probe of the early evolution of the Universe and a crucial test of the consistency of the standard hot Big Bang cosmological model. Although the primordial abundances of 2 H, 3 He, 4 He, and 7 Li inferred from current observational data are in agreement with those predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, recent analysis has severely restricted the consistent range for the nucleon-to-photon ratio: 3.7 ≤ η 10 ≤ 4.0. Increased accuracy in the estimate of primordial 4 he and observations of Be and B in Pop II stars are offering new challenges to the standard model and suggest that no new light particles may be allowed (N ν BBN ≤ 3.0, where N ν is the number of equivalent light neutrinos). 23 refs

Primordial nucleosynthesis remains as one of the pillars of modern cosmology. It is the testing ground upon which many cosmological models must ultimately rest. It is our only probe of the universe during the important radiation-dominated epoch in the first few minutes of cosmic expansion. This paper reviews the basic equations of space-time, cosmology, and big bang nucleosynthesis. We also summarize the current state of observational constraints on primordial abundances along with the key nuclear reactions and their uncertainties. We summarize which nuclear measurements are most crucial during the big bang. We also review various cosmological models and their constraints. In particular, we analyze the constraints that big bang nucleosynthesis places upon the possible time variation of fundamental constants, along with constraints on the nature and origin of dark matter and dark energy, long-lived supersymmetric particles, gravity waves, and the primordial magnetic field.

Big Data is considered proprietary asset of companies, organizations, and even nations. Turning big data into real treasure requires the support of big data systems. A variety of commercial and open source products have been unleashed for big data storage and processing. While big data users are facing the choice of which system best suits their needs, big data system developers are facing the question of how to evaluate their systems with regard to general big data processing needs. System b...

This paper is a very concise history of the authors experiences with particle accelerators, spanning his first experiences as a graduate student, through his professional career. His first experiences were visiting labs in Washington DC, and seeing equipment delivered to his school so large walls had to be moved for access. He saw larger machines in England, and was at GE when early betatrons were built, and when the first functional synchrotron was built

second uses the linear-response theory more familiar to people working in the �eld of condensed-matter physics. We have introduced a quasiparticle ...picture and found that in this picture the bare EIT model in Fig. 2 (a) can be compared to a double EIT system shown in Fig. 2 (b). The quasiparticle ...energy levels consists of a particle (with positive quasiparticle energy ) and a hole (with negative quasiparticle energy) branch. The double EIT

We study a quotient Conformal Field Theory, which describes a 3+1 dimensional cosmological spacetime. Part of this spacetime is the Nappi-Witten (NW) universe, which starts at a 'big bang' singularity, expands and then contracts to a 'big crunch' singularity at a finite time. The gauged WZW model contains a number of copies of the NW spacetime, with each copy connected to the preceding one and to the next one at the respective big bang/big crunch singularities. The sequence of NW spacetimes is further connected at the singularities to a series of non-compact static regions with closed timelike curves. These regions contain boundaries, on which the observables of the theory live. This suggests a holographic interpretation of the physics. (author)

How to effectively use BigQuery, avoid common mistakes, and execute sophisticated queries against large datasets Google BigQuery Analytics is the perfect guide for business and data analysts who want the latest tips on running complex queries and writing code to communicate with the BigQuery API. The book uses real-world examples to demonstrate current best practices and techniques, and also explains and demonstrates streaming ingestion, transformation via Hadoop in Google Compute engine, AppEngine datastore integration, and using GViz with Tableau to generate charts of query results. In addit

Big data is an exciting prospect for the field of economic history, which has long depended on the acquisition, keying, and cleaning of scarce numerical information about the past. This article examines two areas in which economic historians are already using big data - population and environment - discussing ways in which increased frequency of observation, denser samples, and smaller geographic units allow us to analyze the past with greater precision and often to track individuals, places, and phenomena across time. We also explore promising new sources of big data: organically created economic data, high resolution images, and textual corpora.

Full Text Available The article covers analysis of ‘Big Data’ which has been discussed over last 10 years. The reasons and factors for the issue are revealed. It has proved that the factors creating ‘Big Data’ issue has existed for quite a long time, and from time to time, would cause the informational barriers. Such barriers were successfully overcome through the science and technologies. The conducted analysis refers the “Big Data” issue to a form of informative barrier. This issue may be solved correctly and encourages development of scientific and calculating methods.

We investigate the way big rips are approached in a fully inhomogeneous description of the space-time geometry. If the pressure and energy densities are connected by a (supernegative) barotropic index, the spatial gradients and the anisotropic expansion decay as the big rip is approached. This behaviour is contrasted with the usual big-bang singularities. A similar analysis is performed in the case of sudden (quiescent) singularities and it is argued that the spatial gradients may well be non-negligible in the vicinity of pressure singularities.

It seems like “big data” is everywhere these days. In planetary science and astronomy, we’ve been dealing with large datasets for a long time. So how “big” is our data? How does it compare to the big data that a bank or an airline might have? What new tools do we need to analyze big datasets, and how can we make better use of existing tools? What kinds of science problems can we address with these? I’ll address these questions with examples including ESA’s Gaia mission, ...

The Rate Change Big Bang Theory redefines the birth of the universe with a dramatic shift in energy direction and a new vision of the first moments. With rate change graph technology (RCGT) we can look back 13.7 billion years and experience every step of the big bang through geometrical intersection technology. The analysis of the Big Bang includes a visualization of the first objects, their properties, the astounding event that created space and time as well as a solution to the mystery of anti-matter.

Big Data technologies are becoming more popular with the constant grow of data generation in different fields such as social networks, internet of things and laboratories like CERN. How is CERN making use of such technologies? How machine learning is applied at CERN with Big Data technologies? How much data we move and how it is analyzed? All these questions will be answered during the talk.

This paper examines the ethics of big data in agriculture, focusing on the power asymmetry between farmers and large agribusinesses like Monsanto. Following the recent purchase of Climate Corp., Monsanto is currently the most prominent biotech agribusiness to buy into big data. With wireless sensors on tractors monitoring or dictating every decision a farmer makes, Monsanto can now aggregate large quantities of previously proprietary farming data, enabling a privileged position with unique in...

The Big Data era has begun also in the climate sciences, not only in economics or molecular biology. We measure climate at increasing spatial resolution by means of satellites and look farther back in time at increasing temporal resolution by means of natural archives and proxy data. We use powerful supercomputers to run climate models. The model output of the calculations made for the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report amounts to ~650 TB. The 'scientific evolution' of grid computing has started, and the 'scientific revolution' of quantum computing is being prepared. This will increase computing power, and data amount, by several orders of magnitude in the future. However, more data does not automatically mean more knowledge. We need statisticians, who are at the core of transforming data into knowledge. Statisticians notably also explore the limits of our knowledge (uncertainties, that is, confidence intervals and P-values). Mudelsee (2014 Climate Time Series Analysis: Classical Statistical and Bootstrap Methods. Second edition. Springer, Cham, xxxii + 454 pp.) coined the term 'optimal estimation'. Consider the hyperspace of climate estimation. It has many, but not infinite, dimensions. It consists of the three subspaces Monte Carlo design, method and measure. The Monte Carlo design describes the data generating process. The method subspace describes the estimation and confidence interval construction. The measure subspace describes how to detect the optimal estimation method for the Monte Carlo experiment. The envisaged large increase in computing power may bring the following idea of optimal climate estimation into existence. Given a data sample, some prior information (e.g. measurement standard errors) and a set of questions (parameters to be estimated), the first task is simple: perform an initial estimation on basis of existing knowledge and experience with such types of estimation problems. The second task requires the computing power: explore the hyperspace to

Business to business electronic commerce is looming large in the future of the oil industry. It is estimated that by adopting e-commerce the industry could achieve bottom line savings of between $1.8 to $ 3.4 billion a year on annual gross revenues in excess of $ 30 billion. At present there are several teething problems to overcome such as inter-operability standards, which are at least two or three years away. Tying in electronically with specific suppliers is also an expensive proposition, although the big benefits are in fact in doing business with the same suppliers on a continuing basis. Despite these problems, 14 of the world's largest energy and petrochemical companies joined forces in mid-April to create a single Internet procurement marketplace for the industry's complex supply chain. The exchange was designed by B2B (business-to-business) software provider, Commerce One Inc., ; it will leverage the buying clout of these industry giants (BP Amoco, Royal Dutch Shell Group, Conoco, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips Petroleum, Unocal Corporation and Statoil among them), currently about $ 125 billion on procurement per year; they hope to save between 5 to 30 per cent depending on the product and the region involved. Other similar schemes such as Chevron and partners' Petrocosm Marketplace, Network Oil, a Houston-based Internet portal aimed at smaller petroleum companies, are also doing business in the $ 10 billion per annum range. e-Energy, a cooperative project between IBM Ericson and Telus Advertising is another neutral, virtual marketplace targeted at the oil and gas sector. PetroTRAX, a Calgary-based website plans to take online procurement and auction sales a big step forward by establishing a portal to handle any oil company's asset management needs. There are also a number of websites targeting specific needs: IndigoPool.com (acquisitions and divestitures) and WellBid.com (products related to upstream oil and gas operators) are just

Business to business electronic commerce is looming large in the future of the oil industry. It is estimated that by adopting e-commerce the industry could achieve bottom line savings of between $1.8 to $ 3.4 billion a year on annual gross revenues in excess of $ 30 billion. At present there are several teething problems to overcome such as inter-operability standards, which are at least two or three years away. Tying in electronically with specific suppliers is also an expensive proposition, although the big benefits are in fact in doing business with the same suppliers on a continuing basis. Despite these problems, 14 of the world's largest energy and petrochemical companies joined forces in mid-April to create a single Internet procurement marketplace for the industry's complex supply chain. The exchange was designed by B2B (business-to-business) software provider, Commerce One Inc., ; it will leverage the buying clout of these industry giants (BP Amoco, Royal Dutch Shell Group, Conoco, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips Petroleum, Unocal Corporation and Statoil among them), currently about $ 125 billion on procurement per year; they hope to save between 5 to 30 per cent depending on the product and the region involved. Other similar schemes such as Chevron and partners' Petrocosm Marketplace, Network Oil, a Houston-based Internet portal aimed at smaller petroleum companies, are also doing business in the $ 10 billion per annum range. e-Energy, a cooperative project between IBM Ericson and Telus Advertising is another neutral, virtual marketplace targeted at the oil and gas sector. PetroTRAX, a Calgary-based website plans to take online procurement and auction sales a big step forward by establishing a portal to handle any oil company's asset management needs. There are also a number of websites targeting specific needs: IndigoPool.com (acquisitions and divestitures) and WellBid.com (products related to upstream oil and gas operators) are just two examples. All in

In this paper, methods and tools for big data visualization have been investigated. Challenges faced by the big data analysis and visualization have been identified. Technologies for big data analysis have been discussed. A review of methods and tools for big data visualization has been done. Functionalities of the tools have been demonstrated by examples in order to highlight their advantages and disadvantages.

Growing interest in Big Data is leading industries, academics and governments to accelerate Big Data research. However, how teachers should teach Big Data has not been fully examined. This article suggests criteria for redesigning Big Data syllabi in public and private degree-awarding higher education establishments. The author conducted a survey…

A detector constructed for the Standford Linear Collider is described. It consists of a central drift chamber in the field of a surrounding superconducting solenoid. Furthermore included are a Cherenkov ring imaging detector for particle identification and a liquid argon calorimeter. (HSI).

"Billion-dollar science projects end up being about much more than the science, whether we're talking about particle physics, or fusion research, or the international space station, or missions to the moon and beyond, or the next-generation radio telescope." (3 pages)

BigBOSS will obtain observational constraints that will bear on three of the four 'science frontier' questions identified by the Astro2010 Cosmology and Fundamental Phyics Panel of the Decadal Survey: Why is the universe accelerating; what is dark matter and what are the properties of neutrinos? Indeed, the BigBOSS project was recommended for substantial immediate R and D support the PASAG report. The second highest ground-based priority from the Astro2010 Decadal Survey was the creation of a funding line within the NSF to support a 'Mid-Scale Innovations' program, and it used BigBOSS as a 'compelling' example for support. This choice was the result of the Decadal Survey's Program Priorization panels reviewing 29 mid-scale projects and recommending BigBOSS 'very highly'.

The 5th International Conference on Biophotonics (ICOB) held April 30 to May 1, 2017, in Fremantle, Western Australia, brought together opinion leaders to discuss future directions for the field and opportunities to consider. The first session of the conference, "How to Set a Big Picture Biophotonics Agenda," was focused on setting the stage for developing a vision and strategies for translation and impact on society of biophotonic technologies. The invited speakers, panelists, and attendees engaged in discussions that focused on opportunities and promising applications for biophotonic techniques, challenges when working at the confluence of the physical and biological sciences, driving factors for advances of biophotonic technologies, and educational opportunities. We share a summary of the presentations and discussions. Three main themes from the conference are presented in this position paper that capture the current status, opportunities, challenges, and future directions of biophotonics research and key areas of applications: (1) biophotonics at the nano- to microscale level; (2) biophotonics at meso- to macroscale level; and (3) biophotonics and the clinical translation conundrum.

Multiple comparisons and small sample size, common characteristics of many types of "Big Data" including those that are produced by genomic studies, present specific challenges that affect reliability of inference. Use of multiple testing procedures necessitates calculation of very small tail probabilities of a test statistic distribution. Results based on large deviation theory provide a formal condition that is necessary to guarantee error rate control given practical sample sizes, linking the number of tests and the sample size; this condition, however, is rarely satisfied. Using methods that are based on Edgeworth expansions (relying especially on the work of Peter Hall), we explore the impact of departures of sampling distributions from typical assumptions on actual error rates. Our investigation illustrates how far the actual error rates can be from the declared nominal levels, suggesting potentially wide-spread problems with error rate control, specifically excessive false positives. This is an important factor that contributes to "reproducibility crisis". We also review some other commonly used methods (such as permutation and methods based on finite sampling inequalities) in their application to multiple testing/small sample data. We point out that Edgeworth expansions, providing higher order approximations to the sampling distribution, offer a promising direction for data analysis that could improve reliability of studies relying on large numbers of comparisons with modest sample sizes.

We present new upper and lower bounds to the primordial abundances of deuterium and {sup 3}He based on observational data from the solar system and the interstellar medium. Independent of any model for the primordial production of the elements we find (at the 95{percent} C.L.): 1.5{times}10{sup {minus}5}{le}(D/H){sub {ital P}}{le}10.0{times}10{sup {minus}5} and ({sup 3}He/H){sub {ital P}}{le}2.6{times}10{sup {minus}5}. When combined with the predictions of standard big bang nucleosynthesis, these constraints lead to a 95{percent} C.L. bound on the primordial abundance deuterium: (D/H){sub best}=(3.5{sup +2.7}{sub {minus}1.8}){times}10{sup {minus}5}. Measurements of deuterium absorption in the spectra of high-redshift QSOs will directly test this prediction. The implications of this prediction for the primordial abundances of {sup 4}He and {sup 7}Li are discussed, as well as those for the universal density of baryons. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Astronomical Society.}

Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity, and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This article gives overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as well as computing architectures. We also provide various new perspectives on the Big Data analysis and computation. In particular, we emphasize on the viability of the sparsest solution in high-confidence set and point out that exogeneous assumptions in most statistical methods for Big Data can not be validated due to incidental endogeneity. They can lead to wrong statistical inferences and consequently wrong scientific conclusions.

This article dwells on the basic characteristic features of the Big Data technologies. It is analyzed the existing definition of the “big data” term. The article proposes and describes the elements of the generalized formal model of big data. It is analyzed the peculiarities of the application of the proposed model components. It is described the fundamental differences between Big Data technology and business analytics. Big Data is supported by the distributed file system Google File System ...

A variety of observations suggest that the universe had a hot dense origin and that the pregalactic composition of the universe was determined by nuclear reactions that occurred in the first few minutes. There is no unique hot Big Bang theory, but the simplest version produces a primeval chemical composition that is in good qualitative agreement with the abundances deduced from observation. Whether or not any Big Bang theory will provide quantitative agreement with observations depends on a variety of factors in elementary particle physics (number and masses of stable or long-lived particles, half-life of neutron, structure of grand unified theories) and from observational astronomy (present mean baryon density of the universe, the Hubble constant and deceleration parameter). The influence of these factors on the abundances is discussed, as is the effect of departures from homogeneity and isotropy in the early universe.

A variety of observations suggest that the Universe had a hot dense origin and that the pregalactic composition of the Universe was determined by nuclear reactions that occurred in the first few minutes. There is no unique hot Big Bang theory, but the simplest version produces a primeval chemical composition that is in good qualitative agreement with the abundances deduced from observation. Whether or not any Big Bang theory will provide quantitative agreement with observations depends on a variety of factors in elementary particle physics (number and masses of stable or long-lived particles, half-life of neutron, structure of grand unified theories) and from observational astronomy (present mean baryon density of the Universe, the Hubble constant and deceleration parameter). The influence of these factors on the abundances is discussed, as is the effect of departures from homogeneity and isotropy in the early Universe. (author)

The Big Bang theory—widely regarded as the leading explanation for the origin of the universe—posits that space and time sprang into being about 14 billion years ago in a hot, expanding fireball of nearly infinite density. Over the last three decades the theory has been repeatedly revised to address such issues as how galaxies and stars first formed and why the expansion of the universe is speeding up today. Furthermore, an explanation has yet to be found for what caused the Big Bang in the first place. In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present a bold new cosmology. Steinhardt and Turok “contend that what we think of as the moment of creation was simply part of an infinite cycle of titanic collisions between our universe and a parallel world” (Discover). They recount the remarkable developments in astronomy, particle physics, and superstring theory that form the basis for their groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to t...

The hot big-bang cosmology provides a reliable accounting of the Universe from about 10{sup {minus}2} sec after the bang until the present, as well as a robust framework for speculating back to times as early as 10{sup {minus}43} sec. Cosmology faces a number of important challenges; foremost among them are determining the quantity and composition of matter in the Universe and developing a detailed and coherent picture of how structure (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, superclusters, voids, great walls, and so on) developed. At present there is a working hypothesis{emdash}cold dark matter{emdash}which is based upon inflation and which, if correct, would extend the big bang model back to 10{sup {minus}32} sec and cast important light on the unification of the forces. Many experiments and observations, from CBR anisotropy experiments to Hubble Space Telescope observations to experiments at Fermilab and CERN, are now putting the cold dark matter theory to the test. At present it appears that the theory is viable only if the Hubble constant is smaller than current measurements indicate (around 30 km s{sup {minus}1} Mpc{sup {minus}1}), or if the theory is modified slightly, e.g., by the addition of a cosmological constant, a small admixture of hot dark matter (5 eV {open_quote}{open_quote}worth of neutrinos{close_quote}{close_quote}), more relativistic particle or a tilted spectrum of density perturbations.

A is for anchoring the delivery of your research to your audience in a standard-aligned curriculum. B is for BGAN Satellite Communication System assisting in delivering real-time authentic media. C is for a collaborative online learning environment to engage learners" Z is for the peaceful sleep you will get once your program is up and running! As part of Team GoNorth! (http://www.PolarHusky.com) it is our job to deliver adventure learning. We set out to do this back when the computer was a 4-foot, 50-lb box powered by a hand-crank where one would have a window of ten minutes in a 24-hour period to catch the satellite (before Al Gore created the Internet!). Every year we review the quantum leaps in what is now possible from the field and in the classroom, and over the years we have wrestled technical issues, solutions and numerous re-structures in the process of our of curriculum development. With this presentation we will provide some basic ABC's on how you can remained focused on your research, yet deliver an adventure learning program for learners to investigate real-world issues within your scientific research. Our scales are most likely different. The volume of our curriculum is an annual production of 4-500 pages to be used from Kindergarden through 12th grade around the world. The framework of our online learning environment must be able to supports millions of users at a time. "In the field" means on a a 3-4 month dogsled expedition - so sending out our live updates involve thawing out the computers and setting up the satellite communication system to work in a ground blizzard! But regardless of the scope and location of your field research, you can probably build on some of our experiences in the planning of an upcoming adventure learning program to engage learners of all or any ages in your scientific explorations!

Experimental Particle Physics has been at the forefront of analyzing the worlds largest datasets for decades. The HEP community was the first to develop suitable software and computing tools for this task. In recent times, new toolkits and systems collectively called Big Data technologies have emerged to support the analysis of Petabyte and Exabyte datasets in industry. While the principles of data analysis in HEP have not changed (filtering and transforming experiment-specific data formats),...

The scholarship surrounding women's cycling in Australia during the 1890s is slim. However, a focus on female competitive cycling, just one of many diverse cycling activities that women pursued in this era, reveals a rich seam of information. Accordingly, this paper surveys endurance riding, adventure touring and racing, introducing new historical and biographical detail and highlighting the significance of competitive cycling for women in the late nineteenth century. The discussion shows that women's competitive cycling constituted a significant component of Australian cycling history, and helped to re-define women's identity in an era when feminine roles were in flux and the traditional gender order was being contested.

The community softwares, databases, and other various tools have been installed in the ITBL environment by the Office of ITBL Promotion as a common utility property for each research field. Among those softwares, Finite Element Method (FEM) code, Adventure (which was originally developed by Prof. Yoshimura, the University of Tokyo), is provided as one of structure analysis programs for ITBL users. The code is well known to possess a high performance ability for parallel processing, especially for massively parallel environments. In this report, a chain of processes for usages of the system as well as the installation method to PC cluster are described. (author)

The community softwares, databases, and other various tools have been installed in the ITBL environment by the Office of ITBL Promotion as a common utility property for each research field. Among those softwares, Finite Element Method (FEM) code, Adventure (which was originally developed by Prof. Yoshimura, the University of Tokyo), is provided as one of structure analysis programs for ITBL users. The code is well known to possess a high performance ability for parallel processing, especially for massively parallel environments. In this report, a chain of processes for usages of the system as well as the installation method to PC cluster are described. (author)

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics This project consists on developing a marketing plan in the Spanish market for the ice cream brand Max Adventures in the food service sector. The objective of the plan is to increase current level of sales and distribution. For this reason an external and internal audit is done in order to understand the context, observe what competitors are...

Spectral obtained with VLT/UVES suggest the existence of the 6 Li isotope in several metal-poor stars at a level that challenges ideas about its synthesis. The 7 Li abundance is, on the other hand, a factor of three lower than predicted by standard Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory. Both problems may be explained if decaying suppersymmetric particles affect the synthesis of light elements in the Big Bang. (orig.)

Full Text Available This article is a contribution to the understanding of risk-adventure as the set of practices that recuperate the positive dimension of risk. Based on a review of the literature and on the theoretical approach of Constructionist Discursive Psychology, it proposes a model for the analysis of the dimensions of risk adventure present in adventure tourism and radical sports: risk/danger, adrenaline, adventure, training, use of equipments and relationship to nature. The data, derived from the site of a tourism agency that specialized in adventure tourism and an interview with a paraglide practitioner, was analyzed using "trees of association of ideas" and "dialogical maps". All the elements of the model were present in both modalities of risk-adventure. However, adventure tourism was characterized by the delegation of responsibility to specialists, whilst the training/experience dimension made itself more present in radical sports, along with greater emphasis on individual responsibility in the control of risks.

The purpose of this article is to review briefly the nature of protons: creation at the Big Bang, abundance, physical characteristics, internal components, and life span. Several particle discoveries by proton as the experimental tool are considered. Protons play important roles in science, medicine, and industry. This article was prompted by my experience in the curative treatment of cancer patients by protons and my interest in the nature of protons as particles. The latter has been stimulated by many discussions with particle physicists and reading related books and journals. Protons in our universe number ≈10{sup 80}. Protons were created at 10{sup −6} –1 second after the Big Bang at ≈1.37 × 10{sup 10} years beforethe present. Proton life span has been experimentally determined to be ≥10{sup 34} years; that is, the age of the universe is 10{sup −24}th of the minimum life span of a proton. The abundance of the elements is hydrogen, ≈74%; helium, ≈24%; and heavier atoms, ≈2%. Accordingly, protons are the dominant baryonic subatomic particle in the universe because ≈87% are protons. They are in each atom in our universe and thus involved in virtually every activity of matter in the visible universe, including life on our planet. Protons were discovered in 1919. In 1968, they were determined to be composed of even smaller particles, principally quarks and gluons. Protons have been the experimental tool in the discoveries of quarks (charm, bottom, and top), bosons (W{sup +}, W{sup −}, Z{sup 0}, and Higgs), antiprotons, and antineutrons. Industrial applications of protons are numerous and important. Additionally, protons are well appreciated in medicine for their role in radiation oncology and in magnetic resonance imaging. Protons are the dominant baryonic subatomic particle in the visible universe, comprising ≈87% of the particle mass. They are present in each atom of our universe and thus a participant in every activity involving matter.

A few moments after the big-bang matter an antimatter existed in the same quantities. Today the universe seems to be exclusively composed of matter. Nature prefers matter to antimatter but scientists do not know why. Experimental results from Babar and Belle experiments have confirmed the existence of CP violation in quark systems. This article draws the story of the quest for symmetry violation since the discovery of P violation in cobalt decay in the end of the fifties. Our understanding of CP violation is by far insufficient for explaining the matter-antimatter imbalance and may be we will have to admit that CP violation might concern other systems like neutrinos or super-symmetric particles. (A.C.)

A few microseconds after the Big Bang, the Universe was most likely a fiery soup of quarks and gluons – the quark-gluon plasma, or 'quagma' – with the gluons carrying the inter-quark 'colour' force. As this cooled, quarks froze into 'colourless' bricks of nuclear matter – protons, neutrons and other strongly interacting particles – and have remained this way ever since. However in the past few years, Brookhaven and CERN began supplying experiments with high energy beams of heavy nuclei. When such heavy projectiles slam into nuclear targets, the component quarks might be squeezed together and heated, breaking loose and recreating, fleetingly, something approaching quark-gluon plasma

The series The Inner Life of the Elementary Particles attempts to develop the elementary particles along of a genealogical tree, which begins before the ''big bang''. The simple presentation without mathematics opens also for the interested layman a plastic understanding. Volume IX discusses the known puzzles of particle physics and cosmology and offers for many of them explanation models. Explanation approaches are among others the ''DNA'' of the elementary particles and the interpretation of the quanta and the spin.

Fermilab has just inaugurated its Remote Operations Center, a focal point for Fermilab’s participation in the LHC. From the ROC, Fermilab scientists can monitor the accelerator and the CMS experiment as if they were here. It is a symbol of the shrinking world of particle physics research. With a little help from the speed of light along a fibre, the ROC will make sitting at Fermilab little different from sitting at CERN when it comes to being part of the LHC project. When we start running next year, scientists at Fermilab will be able to do almost everything that we can do here, with only the view of the prairie to remind them that they are not actually at CERN. The LHC is set to allow physicists from around the world to address a range of fundamental questions about our Universe, and it is set to do so in ways never done before. The LHC project is allowing a global community of scientists to conduct their research in a more unified manner, forging a model for future col...

From 5 to 7 November, CERN will host the 4th International Conference on Particle and Fundamental Physics in Space (SpacePart12). Special talks open to the general public will be given by two of the biggest names in space exploration: Edward Stone, project scientist for the Voyager probes, and William Gerstenmaier, former Manager of the International Space Station (ISS) programme. Launched at Isola d’Elba (Italy) in 2002, then continued in Washington D.C. (USA) in 2003 and Beijing (China) in 2006, the SpacePart conferences are an opportunity for researchers and space policy makers from across the world to exchange opinions on the developments of space-related science and technology programmes. This year, SpacePart coincides with the centenary of the discovery of cosmic rays and will be held at CERN. On 5 November, Edward Stone, professor at the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for the Voyager probes since 1972, will give a talk on the extraordin...

The concept of "big data" stands to change the face of official statistics over the coming years, having an impact on almost all aspects of data production. The tasks of future statisticians will not necessarily be to produce new data, but rather to identify and make use of existing data to adequately describe social and economic phenomena. Until big data can be used correctly in official statistics, a lot of questions need to be answered and problems solved: the quality of data, data protection, privacy, and the sustainable availability are some of the more pressing issues to be addressed. The essential skills of official statisticians will undoubtedly change, and this implies a number of challenges to be faced by statistical education systems, in universities, and inside the statistical offices. The national statistical offices of the European Union have concluded a concrete strategy for exploring the possibilities of big data for official statistics, by means of the Big Data Roadmap and Action Plan 1.0. This is an important first step and will have a significant influence on implementing the concept of big data inside the statistical offices of Germany.

In the sector of Earth Observation, the explosion of data is due to many factors including: new satellite constellations, the increased capabilities of sensor technologies, social media, crowdsourcing, and the need for multidisciplinary and collaborative research to face Global Changes. In this area, there are many expectations and concerns about Big Data. Vendors have attempted to use this term for their commercial purposes. It is necessary to understand whether Big Data is a radical shift or an incremental change for the existing digital infrastructures. This presentation tries to explore and discuss the impact of Big Data challenges and new capabilities on the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and particularly on its common digital infrastructure called GCI. GEOSS is a global and flexible network of content providers allowing decision makers to access an extraordinary range of data and information at their desk. The impact of the Big Data dimensionalities (commonly known as 'V' axes: volume, variety, velocity, veracity, visualization) on GEOSS is discussed. The main solutions and experimentation developed by GEOSS along these axes are introduced and analyzed. GEOSS is a pioneering framework for global and multidisciplinary data sharing in the Earth Observation realm; its experience on Big Data is valuable for the many lessons learned.

Full Text Available The rise of Big Data changes the context in which organisations producing official statistics operate. Big Data provides opportunities, but in order to make optimal use of Big Data, a number of challenges have to be addressed. This stimulates increased collaboration between National Statistical Institutes, Big Data holders, businesses and universities. In time, this may lead to a shift in the role of statistical institutes in the provision of high-quality and impartial statistical information to society. In this paper, the changes in context, the opportunities, the challenges and the way to collaborate are addressed. The collaboration between the various stakeholders will involve each partner building on and contributing different strengths. For national statistical offices, traditional strengths include, on the one hand, the ability to collect data and combine data sources with statistical products and, on the other hand, their focus on quality, transparency and sound methodology. In the Big Data era of competing and multiplying data sources, they continue to have a unique knowledge of official statistical production methods. And their impartiality and respect for privacy as enshrined in law uniquely position them as a trusted third party. Based on this, they may advise on the quality and validity of information of various sources. By thus positioning themselves, they will be able to play their role as key information providers in a changing society.

The delivery of psychiatric care is changing with a new emphasis on integrated care, preventative measures, population health, and the biological basis of disease. Fundamental to this transformation are big data and advances in the ability to analyze these data. The impact of big data on the routine treatment of bipolar disorder today and in the near future is discussed, with examples that relate to health policy, the discovery of new associations, and the study of rare events. The primary sources of big data today are electronic medical records (EMR), claims, and registry data from providers and payers. In the near future, data created by patients from active monitoring, passive monitoring of Internet and smartphone activities, and from sensors may be integrated with the EMR. Diverse data sources from outside of medicine, such as government financial data, will be linked for research. Over the long term, genetic and imaging data will be integrated with the EMR, and there will be more emphasis on predictive models. Many technical challenges remain when analyzing big data that relates to size, heterogeneity, complexity, and unstructured text data in the EMR. Human judgement and subject matter expertise are critical parts of big data analysis, and the active participation of psychiatrists is needed throughout the analytical process.

We find that experienced poker players typically change their style of play after winning or losing a big pot--most notably, playing less cautiously after a big loss, evidently hoping for lucky cards that will erase their loss. This finding is consistent with Kahneman and Tversky's (Kahneman, D., A. Tversky. 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47(2) 263-292) break-even hypothesis and suggests that when investors incur a large loss, it might be time to take ...

We analyze the big bounce transition of the quantum Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model in the setting of the nonstandard loop quantum cosmology (LQC). Elementary observables are used to quantize composite observables. The spectrum of the energy density operator is bounded and continuous. The spectrum of the volume operator is bounded from below and discrete. It has equally distant levels defining a quantum of the volume. The discreteness may imply a foamy structure of spacetime at a semiclassical level which may be detected in astro-cosmo observations. The nonstandard LQC method has a free parameter that should be fixed in some way to specify the big bounce transition.

The rapidly expanding field of big data analytics has started to play a pivotal role in the evolution of healthcare practices and research. It has provided tools to accumulate, manage, analyze, and assimilate large volumes of disparate, structured, and unstructured data produced by current healthcare systems. Big data analytics has been recently applied towards aiding the process of care delivery and disease exploration. However, the adoption rate and research development in this space is still hindered by some fundamental problems inherent within the big data paradigm. In this paper, we discuss some of these major challenges with a focus on three upcoming and promising areas of medical research: image, signal, and genomics based analytics. Recent research which targets utilization of large volumes of medical data while combining multimodal data from disparate sources is discussed. Potential areas of research within this field which have the ability to provide meaningful impact on healthcare delivery are also examined.

Full Text Available ith loyalty and high power of buying. Research impact of brand image and guest satisfaction on customer loyalty is important to do in order to obtain an explanation of the relationship between brand image and customer satisfaction on customer loyalty. The purpose of this study is 1 to identify the circumstance brand image on customer loyalty. 2 to identify the circumstance customer satisfaction on customer loyalty. 3 to determine the circumstance brand image and customer satisfaction on customer loyalty. This research was conducted at Bali Adventure Rafting. Result shows that branding and customer satisfaction has a significant effect on customer loyalty in Bali Adventure Rafting with result 41,7%. This result is obtained from the value of determination D x 100% = 0,417 x 100% = 41,7%. This means that the brand image and customer satisfaction contributing positively to customer loyalty of rating of 41,7% and the remaining 58,3% is influenced by others factors such as costumers satisfaction, marketing strategy.

Western discourses about young people and sexuality centre around the concept of risk. Anxieties have been fuelled by the increasing popularity of social media and practices such as 'sexting' and watching 'sexually explicit' materials online. Research has shown however that such risk discourses mainly serve to moralise about, pathologise and police particular behaviours and children. In order to counter such paternalism, researchers advocated a reconceptualisation of youth not as passive victims, but as active agents who actively negotiate sexual experiences and discourses. In this paper, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork among young people in The Netherlands, I argue that we need a reconceptualisation not only of youth, but also of their sexual practices, especially their online sexual practices. Mobilising an interdisciplinary interaction between critical socio-cultural studies of risk, feminist theory and adventure studies, I propose to reconceptualise these practices as 'adventures' rather than 'risky behaviour'. This opens up possibilities for a more reasoned analysis that acknowledges: (1) the distinction between risks and outcomes of an activity; (2) the constructive potential of risk; and (3) the subjective, dynamic character of risk and pleasure.

High energy physics during the last 20 years has utilized proton accelerators like the CERN PS. Now, however, fundamental questions can only be answered through experiments using beams of electrons, muons or neutrinos for the study of collisions between light particles or between light and heavy particles. The detection of light particles as the end products of interactions is also of great interest. The super protosynchrotron experimental programme which started in January 1977 is discussed with particular reference to the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC). (2 refs).

Cultural diversity is often attributed to groups in a society from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Assimilation then blends subcultures into a mainstream culture. However, history and circumstance give rise to new groups whose experiences and activities produce new diversity. Big events and big changes give rise to important differences between…

The Standard Model of particle physics was developed in the seventies. Despite many experimental successes, it presents many problems that can only be solved with models beyond the Standard Model. Supersymmetry is an interesting candidate, postulating a new symmetry between fermions and bosons. This model can also have interesting applications in cosmology. It offers potentially good candidates for dark matter, what represents 25% of the energy density of the Universe, and its nature is unknown. Another cosmological problem is the lithium problems in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis describing the production of light elements in the first seconds of the Universe. The lithium abundance predicted by the theory is inconsistent with observations. I study a scenario in which a supersymmetric particle, the gravitino, is the candidate for dark matter and the production of this particle through the decay of other supersymmetric particles may solve the lithium problems. (author)

A number of recent studies have revealed that taking part in a sail-training-based Adventure Education Programme elevates youths' self-esteem. Across two studies, we sought to examine the extent to which youths' sense of belonging contributed to this increase in self-esteem. Study 1 revealed that participants who completed the voyage showed an…

This study investigated the effectiveness of Adventure Based Counseling upon high school adolescents. The goals of this study were to (a) explore the effectiveness of ABC Counseling in increasing levels of self-esteem and empathy among adolescents; (b) study the efficacy of ABC counseling in reducing perceived racial discrimination, racist…

Background: There is an increasing need to identify effective mental health treatment practices for children and adolescents in community-based settings, due to current mixed findings of existing interventions. This study looked at adventure therapy (AT) as a viable option to meet this need. Objective: Using a sample of 1,135 youth from a…

Full Text Available Although Edinburgh-born author Robert Louis Stevenson is best known as a writer of nineteenth-century popular adventures, his work to a great extent challenges prevailing adventure ideology of the Victorian era. This paper focuses on Stevenson's complexification of the villain trope in The Ebb-Tide, a South Seas novella published only a few months before his death in 1894. In the text, Stevenson blatantly disregards or dismantles typical colonial presentations of a simplistic villain personified through such topoi as the 'demonic male', the violent-but-beautiful female savage, or the vaguely formidable Other - all of which frequently populate adventure's exotic realm in nineteenth-century fiction. Rather than relying upon these culturally codified depictions, in The Ebb-Tide Stevenson presents villainy as embodied by a dangerous amalgamation of ordinary vice and extraordinary evil that traverses those national and ethnic boundaries that colonialism so often sought to demarcate and solidify. The portrayal of villainy within this text culminates in a nightmarish atmosphere which, in Stevenson's fiction, inevitably results from the unchecked workings of personal transgressions combined with a larger and more powerful indicator of evil. In so doing, the author succeeds in creating a dark narrative latent with culturally relevant commentary which, in turn, contributes to his broader re-navigation of an ethically-charged aesthetics of adventure for a modern audience.

Compares "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," noting that both: (1) were begun for the amusement of specific children; (2) use a subterranean journey as a device; (3) are critical of social authority; and (4) have problematic endings. (SRT)

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in motivations for outdoor adventure recreation pursuits over a short period of time (pre- to posttest) for participants with different levels of development. Subjects were 100 undergraduate recreation majors from separate similar summer session Outdoor Education Practicum courses, each of which included 7 days in a camp...

This article examines the use of adventure-based experiential therapy (AET) with child and adolescent psychiatry inpatients. AET environments, indications, practicality, therapeutic effects and research are outlined and clinical findings are reported. Activities such as rock-climbing, exploring a creek and caving are discussed and the limitations…

The author retells the origin story of Sierra On-Line and its historic first product, the graphical adventure game "Mystery House." She reviews the academic and journalistic writing that placed the story almost exclusively inside a narrative about early computer games, treating it as a saga of the competition between the graphic…

Bigger, better, and broader in scope, the Big Book of Windows Hacks gives you everything you need to get the most out of your Windows Vista or XP system, including its related applications and the hardware it runs on or connects to. Whether you want to tweak Vista's Aero interface, build customized sidebar gadgets and run them from a USB key, or hack the "unhackable" screensavers, you'll find quick and ingenious ways to bend these recalcitrant operating systems to your will. The Big Book of Windows Hacks focuses on Vista, the new bad boy on Microsoft's block, with hacks and workarounds that

A critical analysis of the "keep everything" Big Data era, the impact on our lives of the information, at first glance "convenient for future use" that we make known about ourselves on the network. NB! The lecture will be recorded like all Academic Training lectures. Lecturer's biography: Father of the Internet, see https://internethalloffame.org/inductees/vint-cerf or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf The video on slide number 9 is from page https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2018&value;;&chart-type=bubbles Keywords: Big Data, Internet, History, Applications, tools, privacy, technology, preservation, surveillance, google, Arpanet, CERN, Web

It is stated that the framework of baryon symmetric big bang (BSBB) cosmology offers our greatest potential for deducting the evolution of the Universe because its physical laws and processes have the minimum number of arbitrary assumptions about initial conditions in the big-bang. In addition, it offers the possibility of explaining the photon-baryon ratio in the Universe and how galaxies and galaxy clusters are formed. BSBB cosmology also provides the only acceptable explanation at present for the origin of the cosmic γ-ray background radiation. (author)

This release plan is to provide instructions for the Radiological Control Technician (RCT) to conduct surveys for the unconditional release of ''Big Pete,'' which was used in the removal of ''Spacers'' from the N-Reactor. Prior to performing surveys on the rear end portion of ''Big Pete,'' it shall be cleaned (i.e., free of oil, grease, caked soil, heavy dust). If no contamination is found, the vehicle may be released with the permission of the area RCT Supervisor. If contamination is found by any of the surveys, contact the cognizant Radiological Engineer for decontamination instructions

The term "Big Data" is commonly used to describe the growing mass of information being created recently. New conclusions can be drawn and new services can be developed by the connection, processing and analysis of these information. This affects all aspects of life, including health and medicine. The authors review the application areas of Big Data, and present examples from health and other areas. However, there are several preconditions of the effective use of the opportunities: proper infrastructure, well defined regulatory environment with particular emphasis on data protection and privacy. These issues and the current actions for solution are also presented.

We show there exist smooth asymptotically anti-de Sitter initial data which evolve to a big crunch singularity in a low energy supergravity limit of string theory. This opens up the possibility of using the dual conformal field theory to obtain a fully quantum description of the cosmological singularity. A preliminary study of this dual theory suggests that the big crunch is an endpoint of evolution even in the full string theory. We also show that any theory with scalar solitons must have negative energy solutions. The results presented here clarify our earlier work on cosmic censorship violation in N=8 supergravity. (author)

Our universe appears to have been created not out of nothing but from a strange space-time dust. Quantum geometry (loop quantum gravity) makes it possible to avoid the ominous beginning of our universe with its physically unrealistic (i.e. infinite) curvature, extreme temperature, and energy density. This could be the long sought after explanation of the big-bang and perhaps even opens a window into a time before the big-bang: Space itself may have come from an earlier collapsing universe tha...

In many European countries, data on geographical patterns of internal elderly migration show that the elderly (55+) are more likely to leave than to move to the big cities. Besides emphasising the attractive features of the destination areas (pull factors), it is often assumed that this negative

Many kinds of arthropod natural enemies (predators and parasitoids) inhabit crop fields in Arizona and can have a large negative impact on several pest insect species that also infest these crops. Geocoris spp., commonly known as big-eyed bugs, are among the most abundant insect predators in field c...

Big Bang, mes ancêtres et moi, by Franco-German TV producer ARTE (2009) What do we know about the origins of the world today? This documentary presents a voyage into the mystery of these origins, accompanied by passionate scientists such as paleoanthropologist Pascal Picq, astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, physicist Etienne Klein and quantum gravity theorist Abhay Ashtekar. Organized around three key moments – the birth of the Universe, the appearance of life and the origins of mankind – this investigation takes us to various research areas around the world, including the large underground particle accelerator at CERN. The German version of this film, Big Bang im Labor, will be presented on 1st October. Big Bang, mes ancêtres et moi will be shown on Friday, 24 September from 13:00 to 14:00 in room 222-R-001 Language: French Big Bang im Labor will be shown on Friday, 1 October from 13:00 to 14:00 in the Main Auditorium Language : German &nbs...

Abstract This thesis aims to explore the concept of big data, and create understanding of big data maturity in the Finnish financial services industry. The research questions of this thesis are “What kind of big data solutions are being implemented in the Finnish financial services sector?” and “Which factors impede faster implementation of big data solutions in the Finnish financial services sector?”. ...

Big changes are ahead for China, probably abrupt ones. The economy has grown so rapidly for many years, over 30 years at an average of nine percent a year, that its size makes it a major player in trade and finance and increasingly in political and military matters. This growth is not only of great importance internationally, it is already having…

This chapter examines the ways in which big data is involved in the rise of smart cities. Mobile phones, sensors and online applications produce streams of data which are used to regulate and plan the city, often in real time, but which presents challenges as to how the city’s functions are seen and

Big Data, often defined according to the 5V model (volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value), is seen as the key towards personalized healthcare. However, it also confronts us with new technological and ethical challenges that require more sophisticated data management tools and data analysis

The ethical conduct of research includes, in part, patient agreement to participate in studies and the protection of health information. In the evolving world of data science and the accessibility of large quantities of web-based data created by millions of individuals, novel methodologic approaches to answering research questions are emerging. This article explores research ethics in the context of big data.

Urges an approach to the teaching of history that takes the largest possible perspective, crossing time as well as space. Discusses the problems and advantages of such an approach. Describes a course on "big" history that begins with time, creation myths, and astronomy, and moves on to paleontology and evolution. (DK)

No data source is perfect. Mistakes inevitably creep in. Spotting errors is hard enough when dealing with survey responses from several thousand people, but the difficulty is multiplied hugely when that mysterious beast Big Data comes into play. Statistics Netherlands is about to publish its first

IBHA, the International Big History Association, was organized in 2010 and "promotes the unified, interdisciplinary study and teaching of history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity." This is the vision that Montessori embraced long before the discoveries of modern science fleshed out the story of the evolving universe. "Big…

Two years ago NASA established the Ad Hoc Big Data Task Force (BDTF - https://science.nasa.gov/science-committee/subcommittees/big-data-task-force), an advisory working group with the NASA Advisory Council system. The scope of the Task Force included all NASA Big Data programs, projects, missions, and activities. The Task Force focused on such topics as exploring the existing and planned evolution of NASA's science data cyber-infrastructure that supports broad access to data repositories for NASA Science Mission Directorate missions; best practices within NASA, other Federal agencies, private industry and research institutions; and Federal initiatives related to big data and data access. The BDTF has completed its two-year term and produced several recommendations plus four white papers for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. This presentation will discuss the activities and results of the TF including summaries of key points from its focused study topics. The paper serves as an introduction to the papers following in this ESSI session.

"Big Math for Little Kids," a comprehensive program for 4- and 5-year-olds, develops and expands on the mathematics that children know and are capable of doing. The program uses activities and stories to develop ideas about number, shape, pattern, logical reasoning, measurement, operations on numbers, and space. The activities introduce the…

Full Text Available In recent years, dealing with a lot of data originating from social media sites and mobile communications among data from business environments and institutions, lead to the definition of a new concept, known as Big Data. The economic impact of the sheer amount of data produced in a last two years has increased rapidly. It is necessary to aggregate all types of data (structured and unstructured in order to improve current transactions, to develop new business models, to provide a real image of the supply and demand and thereby, generate market advantages. So, the companies that turn to Big Data have a competitive advantage over other firms. Looking from the perspective of IT organizations, they must accommodate the storage and processing Big Data, and provide analysis tools that are easily integrated into business processes. This paper aims to discuss aspects regarding the Big Data concept, the principles to build, organize and analyse huge datasets in the business environment, offering a three-layer architecture, based on actual software solutions. Also, the article refers to the graphical tools for exploring and representing unstructured data, Gephi and NodeXL.

at different distances (that is, at different epochs in the past) to come to this ... that the expansion started billions of years ago from an explosive Big Bang. Recent research sheds new light on the key cosmological question about the distant ...

Big Data refers to datasets that are so large and complex that traditional methods and hardware for collecting, sharing, and analyzing them are not possible. Big Data that is accurate leads to more confident decision making, improved operational efficiency, and reduced costs. The rapid growth of health care information results in Big Data around health services, treatments, and outcomes, and Big Data can be used to analyze the benefit of health system pharmacy services. The goal of this article is to provide a perspective on how Big Data can be applied to health system pharmacy. It will define Big Data, describe the impact of Big Data on population health, review specific implications of Big Data in health system pharmacy, and describe an approach for pharmacy leaders to effectively use Big Data. A few strategies involved in managing Big Data in health system pharmacy include identifying potential opportunities for Big Data, prioritizing those opportunities, protecting privacy concerns, promoting data transparency, and communicating outcomes. As health care information expands in its content and becomes more integrated, Big Data can enhance the development of patient-centered pharmacy services.

Big data is a well-known phenomenon, even a buzzword nowadays. It refers to an abundance of data and new possibilities to process and use them. Big data is subject of many publications. Some pay attention to the many possibilities of big data, others warn us for their consequences. This special

This is the decade of data analytics and big data, but not everyone agrees with the definition of big data. Some researchers see it as the future of data analysis, while others consider it as hype and foresee its demise in the near future. No matter how it is defined, big data for the time being is having its glory moment. The most important…

Big data create values for business and research, but pose significant challenges in terms of networking, storage, management, analytics and ethics. Multidisciplinary collaborations from engineers, computer scientists, statisticians and social scientists are needed to tackle, discover and understand big data. This survey presents an overview of big data initiatives, technologies and research in industries and academia, and discusses challenges and potential solutions. PMID:26504265

BigBOSS is a Stage IV ground-based dark energy experiment to study baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and the growth of structure with a wide-area galaxy and quasar redshift survey over 14,000 square degrees. It has been conditionally accepted by NOAO in response to a call for major new instrumentation and a high-impact science program for the 4-m Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak. The BigBOSS instrument is a robotically-actuated, fiber-fed spectrograph capable of taking 5000 simultaneous spectra over a wavelength range from 340 nm to 1060 nm, with a resolution R = {lambda}/{Delta}{lambda} = 3000-4800. Using data from imaging surveys that are already underway, spectroscopic targets are selected that trace the underlying dark matter distribution. In particular, targets include luminous red galaxies (LRGs) up to z = 1.0, extending the BOSS LRG survey in both redshift and survey area. To probe the universe out to even higher redshift, BigBOSS will target bright [OII] emission line galaxies (ELGs) up to z = 1.7. In total, 20 million galaxy redshifts are obtained to measure the BAO feature, trace the matter power spectrum at smaller scales, and detect redshift space distortions. BigBOSS will provide additional constraints on early dark energy and on the curvature of the universe by measuring the Ly-alpha forest in the spectra of over 600,000 2.2 < z < 3.5 quasars. BigBOSS galaxy BAO measurements combined with an analysis of the broadband power, including the Ly-alpha forest in BigBOSS quasar spectra, achieves a FOM of 395 with Planck plus Stage III priors. This FOM is based on conservative assumptions for the analysis of broad band power (k{sub max} = 0.15), and could grow to over 600 if current work allows us to push the analysis to higher wave numbers (k{sub max} = 0.3). BigBOSS will also place constraints on theories of modified gravity and inflation, and will measure the sum of neutrino masses to 0.024 eV accuracy.

I suggest the existence of a still undiscovered interaction: repulsion between matter and antimatter. The simplest and the most elegant candidate for such a force is gravitational repulsion between particles and antiparticles. I argue that such a force may give birth to a new Universe; by transforming an eventual Big Crunch of our universe, to an event similar to Big Bang. In fact, when a collapsing Universe is reduced to a supermassive black hole of a small size, a very strong field of the conjectured force may create particle-antiparticle pairs from the surrounding vacuum. The amount of the antimatter created from the physical vacuum is equal to the decrease of mass of "black hole Universe" and violently repelled from it. When the size of the black hole is sufficiently small the creation of antimatter may become so huge and fast, that matter of our Universe may disappear in a fraction of the Planck time. So fast transformation of matter to antimatter may look like a Big Bang with the initial size about 30 o...

Summary Objectives To select best papers published in 2013 in the field of big data and smart health strategies, and summarize outstanding research efforts. Methods A systematic search was performed using two major bibliographic databases for relevant journal papers. The references obtained were reviewed in a two-stage process, starting with a blinded review performed by the two section editors, and followed by a peer review process operated by external reviewers recognized as experts in the field. Results The complete review process selected four best papers, illustrating various aspects of the special theme, among them: (a) using large volumes of unstructured data and, specifically, clinical notes from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for pharmacovigilance; (b) knowledge discovery via querying large volumes of complex (both structured and unstructured) biological data using big data technologies and relevant tools; (c) methodologies for applying cloud computing and big data technologies in the field of genomics, and (d) system architectures enabling high-performance access to and processing of large datasets extracted from EHRs. Conclusions The potential of big data in biomedicine has been pinpointed in various viewpoint papers and editorials. The review of current scientific literature illustrated a variety of interesting methods and applications in the field, but still the promises exceed the current outcomes. As we are getting closer towards a solid foundation with respect to common understanding of relevant concepts and technical aspects, and the use of standardized technologies and tools, we can anticipate to reach the potential that big data offer for personalized medicine and smart health strategies in the near future. PMID:25123721